A Load Balanced Routing Protocol Based on Ant Colony Algorithm for Wireless Mesh Networks

Routing algorithm as a research core in the wireless mesh network, the design is good or bad is very important to network performance. In the field of ant colony optimization (ACO), models of collective intelligence of ants are transformed into useful optimization techniques that find applications in computer networking. Unbalanced traffic may lead to more delay, packet dropping, and decreasing packet delivery ratio (PDR). Therefore, this paper proposes a routing algorithm based on the ant colony algorithm. The proposed algorithm improves rules of pheromone update. The link which has the smaller number of hops, lower congestion level and higher bandwidth should have a larger probability. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm reduces the average end-to-end delay and control overhead, and increases the successful transfer rate of WMN. So the network throughput and stability can be improved significantly by the proposed algorithm.