ABSTRACT

In recent years, mobile computing and wireless networks have witnessed a tremendous rise in popularity and technological advancement. The basic routing problem in MANET deals with methods to transport a packet across a network from source node to destination node. Due to the dynamic nature of MANET, it is difficult to design effective routing algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a novel metaheuristic on-demand routing protocol Ant-E, using the Blocking Expanding Ring Search (Blocking-ERS) to control the overhead and local retransmission to improve the reliability in term of packet delivery ratio (PDR). This method enhances the efficiency of MANET routing protocol. Ant-E is inspired by the ant-colony optimization (ACO) used to solve complex optimization problems and utilizes a collection of mobile agents as “ants” to perform optimal routing activities. Exhaustive simulations are carried out and it is observed that, Ant-E performs better than other two on demand routing protocols like AODV and DSR.