An Ant Colony Based Congestion Elusion Routing Scheme for MANET

A critical challenge for mobile ad hoc networks is the design of efficient routing protocols that are able to provide high bandwidth utilization and desired fairness in mobile wireless environment without any fixed communication establishments. While extensive efforts have already been devoted to providing optimization based, distributed congestion elusion schemes for efficient bandwidth utilization and fair allocation in both wired and wireless networks, a common assumption therein is fixed link capacities, which will unfortunately limit the application scope in mobile ad hoc networks where channels are ever changing. In this paper, an effective congestion elusion scheme is presented explicitly based on ant colony algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks, which will explore the optimal route between two nodes promptly, meanwhile forecast congestion state of the link. Accordingly, a new path will be found rapidly to have the flow spread around to relieve the congestion state. Compare with OLSR, the scheme proposed here will greatly reduce the packet loss ratio and the average end-to-end delay at the same time, which illustrate that it will make use of networking resource effectively.