A Novel Grid Based Ant Colony Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Zone based routing algorithm or Grid based routing algorithm is widely utilized in hierarchical routing protocols to balance the control overheads and packet delivery delay in mobile ad hoc network (MANET). However, how to effectively utilize the hierarchical routing features to develop an efficient inter-zone routing algorithm remains to be a problem. On the other hand, a number of routing algorithms based on the ant colony routing algorithm have been proposed due to its robustness, but they may suffer a large overhead in high dynamic networks. To cope with these deficiencies we propose a novel grid based ant colony routing protocol called GAR. In GAR, a novel ant colony routing algorithm is adapted to search routes between zones, and a multiplied grid leader election mechanism is developed. One favorable feature of GAR is the pheromone grid store manner, which keeps the pheromone information on the geographic area rather than the node. Simulation results showed that the GAR protocol can reduce the overhead while maintaining good packet deliver ratio in high dynamic network compared with LAR and GRID.