An Efficient Route Selection Policy Protocol for Multi-path Routing in MANETS

In Mobile ad hoc networks, the on demand multi-path routing protocols addresses certain issues such as more message overheads, link failures and node's high mobility. More message overheads are caused due to increased flooding. Packets are dropped by intermediate nodes due to frequent link failures. Moreover the overall throughput and the packet delivery ratio is reduced in high mobility scenarios. In order to overcome the issues an efficient multipath routing protocol based on Ant Colony Optimization is proposed. The multipath routing algorithm sets up path only when it is needed at the start of a data session. The forward ants are launched by the source in order to find multiple paths to the destination, and backward ants return the source to set up the paths. A reactive path is set up by the forward ant which provides the routing information of a node. The best path for each ant is selected based upon the number of hops and travel time. The proposed scheme has been experimented with NS2 and results show that the proposed approach outperforms in terms of better packet delivery ratio and reduced end-to-end delay.