A Position Based Ant Colony Routing Algorithm for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Position based routing algorithms use the knowledge of the position of nodes for routing of packets in mobile ad-hoc networks. Previously proposed position based routing algorithms may fail to find a route from a source to a destination in some types of ad-hoc networks and if they find a route, it may be much longer than the shortest path. On the other hand, routing algorithms which are based on ant colony optimization find routing paths that are close in length to the shortest paths. The drawback of these algorithms is the large number of control messages that needs to be sent or the long delay before the routes are established from a source to a destination. In this paper we propose a new reactive routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks, called POSANT (Position based Ant Colony Routing Algorithm), which combines the idea of ant colony optimization with information about the position of nodes. In contrast to the other ant colony optimization based routing algorithms, our simulations show that POSANT has a relatively short route establishment time while using a small number of control messages which makes it a scalable reactive routing algorithm.