An ant colony algorithm based congestion elusion routing strategy for mobile ad hoc networks

A critical challenge for mobile ad hoc networks is the design of efficient routing protocols which are able to provide high bandwidth utilization and desired fairness in mobile wireless environment without any fixed communication establishments. Although extensive efforts have already been devoted to providing optimization based distributed congestion elusion strategy for efficient bandwidth utilization and fair allocation in both wired and wireless networks, a common assumption therein is the fixed link capacities, which will unfortunately limit the application scope in mobile ad hoc networks where channels keep changing. In this paper, an effective congestion elusion strategy is presented explicitly based on ant colony algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks, which will explore the optimal route between two nodes promptly, meanwhile forecast congestion state of the link. Accordingly, a new path will be found rapidly to have the flow spread around to relieve the congestion degree. Compared with OLSR, the strategy proposed will greatly reduce the packet loss ratio and the average end-to-end delay at the same time, which illustrate that it will make use of networking resource effectively.