A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without using centralized access points, infrastructure, or centralized administration. Routing means the act of moving information across an internet work from a source to a destination. The biggest challenge in this kind of networks is to find a path between the communication end points, what is aggravated through the node mobility. In this paper we present a new routing algorithm for mobile, multi-hop ad-hoc networks. The protocol is based on swarm intelligence. Ant colony algorithms are a subset of swarm intelligence and consider the ability of simple ants to solve complex problems by cooperation. The introduced routing protocol is well adaptive, efficient and scalable. The main goal in the design of the protocol is to reduce the overhead for routing. We refer to the protocol as the Ant Colony Optimization Routing (ACOR).
ANT COLONY OPTIMIZED ROUTING FOR MOBILE ADHOC NETWORKS (MANET)