Intelligent Routing Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Swarm Intelligence: a Survey

A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous self-organizing wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without using centralized access points. They use wireless medium for communication, hence two nodes can communicate directly if and only if they are within each other’s transmission radius in a multi-hop fashion. In MANET, each node can act as a node as well as a router. But due to non-availability of centralized administration, there is a difficulty of routing optimization. Many conventional routing algorithms have been proposed for MANETs. There are various protocols like AODV, DSDV, DSR, ZRP etc. available for routing in MANET. Routing strategies are an important feature of network administration, as they have a significant influence on the overall network performance. An emerging area that has recently captured much attention in network routing researches is Swarm Intelligence (SI). Besides conventional approaches, a lot of new researches have proposed the adoption of Swarm Intelligence for MANET routing. Swarm Intelligence refers to complex behaviors that arise from very simple individual behaviors and interactions, which is regularly observed in nature, particularly among social insects such as ants, bees, fishes etc. While each individual has little intelligence and simply follows basic rules using local information obtained from the environment. Basically, Swarm Intelligence is an artificial intelligence technique based around on the study of collective behaviour in decentralized, self-organized systems. Ants routing resembles basic mechanisms from distributed Swarm Intelligence in biological systems and turns out to become an interesting solution where routing is a crisis. Ants based routing is becoming more popular because of its adaptive and dynamic nature. Also, they are more robust and reliable than other conventional routing techniques. Ant Colony Optimization is well-liked among other Swarm Intelligent Techniques. In this paper, we study bio-inspired routing protocols for MANETs. This paper also introduces the preliminary studies for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks.