Ants Pheromone for Quality of Service Provisioning In Mobile Adhoc Networks

Due to variable link conditions in Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs), routing among mobile nodes causes network topology and traffic load conditions to change dynamically. Also, Multimedia real-time session services, such as voice and videoconferences are highly desirable in many Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Providing Quality of Service (QoS) in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks is challenging task due to the resource limitations and dynamic nature of MANETs. In some cases, it becomes very difficult to provide with appropriate QoS or even, it may be impossible to guarantee strict QoS requirements. Many researches have shown the importance of providing QoS mechanism at multiple layers in the protocol stack, because QoS can improve performance in MANET and allow critical information to flow even under difficult conditions.

Inspired by Swarm Intelligence (SI), more especially ants pheromone update process, found in natural insects like ants colony, in this paper, we propose a hybrid QoS routing algorithm which can improve the performance in MANET. The hybrid quality of the algorithm makes it suitable for all the environments in comparison with reactive and proactive protocols. Ant's pheromone update process approach has inherited advantage of robustness and fast convergence, which makes it an appropriate choice over existing QoS algorithms to improve the performance for MANET.