A hybrid multiagent routing approach for wireless ad hoc networks

Wireless ad-hoc networks are infrastructureless networks that comprise wireless mobile nodes able to communicate each other outside wireless transmission range. Due to frequent network topology changes in one hand and the limited underlying bandwidth in the other hand, routing becomes a challenging task. In this paper we present a novel routing algorithm devoted for mobile ad hoc networks. It entails both reactive and proactive components. More precisely, the algorithm is based on ant general behavior, but differs from the classic ant methods inspired from Ant-Colony-Optimization algorithm [1]. We do not use, during the reactive phase, a broadcasting technique that exponentially increases the routing overhead, but we introduce a new reactive route discovery technique that considerably reduces the communication overhead. In the simulation results, we show that our protocol can outperform both Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol [2], one of the most important current state-of-the-art algorithms, and AntHocNet protocol [5], one of the most important ant-based routing algorithms, in terms of end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio and the communication overhead.