Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on

Pattern Recognition, Informatics and Mobile Engineering (PRIME) February 21-22

978-1-4673-5845-3/13/$31.002013 IEEE

Ant based Intelligent Routing Protocol for MANET

D. Karthikeyan
Department of ECE
Kongunadu College of Engineering and Technology
India
duraikkeyan@gmail.com
M. Dharmalingam
Department of ECE
Kongunadu College of Engineering and Technology
India
dlingam6@gmail.com


AbstractMobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a group of mobile
nodes which communicates with each other without any
supporting infrastructure. Routing in MANET is extremely
challenging because of MANETs dynamic features, its limited
bandwidth and power energy. MANET nodes operating on
battery try to pursue the energy efficiency heuristically by
reducing the energy they consumed. Literature shows though
they maintain acceptable performance of certain tasks, for multi-
hop routing this is not optimal strategy. Nature-inspired
algorithms (swarm intelligence) such as ant colony optimization
(ACO) algorithms have shown to be a good technique for
developing routing algorithms for MANETs. Swarm intelligence
is a computational intelligence technique that involves collective
behavior of autonomous agents that locally interact with each
other in a distributed environment to solve a given problem in
the hope of finding a global solution to the problem. We propose
an energy efficient routing algorithm for MANETs based on
ACO for minimizing energy consumption of the nodes and
prolong the life of the overall communication system. The
performance of the proposed algorithm is simulated on the
network tool NS2 and is also compared with existing algorithms
performance.
Keywords- Routing; MANET; energy efficiency; Power save; Ant
Colony optimization; Swarm Intelligence
I. INTRODUCTION
Minimizing Energy consumption is an important challenge
in mobile networking. Important progress has been made low
power hardware design for mobile devices that the wireless
network interface is often a devices single largest consumer of
power. Since the network interface may often be idle, this
power could be saved by turning the ratio off when not in use.
In practice, however, this approach is not straightforward: a
node must arrange to turn its ratio on not just receive packets
addressed to it, but also to participate in any higher level
routing and control protocol. The requirement of cooperation
between power and routing protocol is particularly acute in the
case of multi-hop ad hoc wireless network where nodes must
forward packets for each other. Management of power saving
with routing in ad hoc wireless networks is the subject of this
paper.
A good power-saving coordination technique for wireless
ad-hoc networks ought to have the following characteristics. It
should allow as many nodes as possible to turn their radio
receivers off most of the time, since even an idle receive
circuit can consume almost as much energy as an active
transmitter. On the other hand, it should forward packets
between any source and destination with minimally more delay
than if all nodes were awake. This implies that enough nodes
must stay awake to form a connected backbone.
The algorithm presented in this paper, span fulfills the
above requirements. Each node in the network running span
makes periodic, local decisions on whether to sleep or stay
awake as a coordinator and regular node in the participate in
the forwarding backbone topology. To preserve capacity, a
node decides to volunteer to be a coordinator node if it
discovers that two of its neighbors cannot communicate with
each other directly or through an existing coordinator. To keep
the number of redundant coordinators low and rotate this role
amongst all nodes. Each node delays announcing its
willingness with a random delay that takes two factors into
account: the amount of remaining battery energy, and the
number of pairs of neighbors it connects together. Span does
all this using only local information, consequently scaling well
with the number of nodes.
Contributions
In this paper, we present an Energy Efficient routing
protocol for mobile Ad-hoc networks for improving the
network lifetime. Main contributions of our work are as
follows:
Energy Consumption
Energy efficiency is an important consideration in such an
environment. Nodes in MANETs rely on limited battery power
for their energy. Energy-saving techniques aimed at
minimizing the total power consumption of all nodes in the
multicast group (minimize the number of nodes used to
establish multicast connectivity, minimize the number of
overhead controls, etc.) and at maximizing the multicast life
span should be considered.
II. RELATED WORK
Ant- E[1] method enhances the efficiency of MANET
routing protocol. Ant-E inspired by Ant Colony Optimization
utilizes a collection of mobile agents as ants to perform the
optical activities.
In BECA/AFECA [2] was one one of the first papers to
propose power save protocol. it proposed two simple protocols.
the Basic-Energy Conserving Algorithm(BECA) and the
Adaptive Fidelity Energy-Conserving Algorithm (AFECA),
with AFECA being extension of BECA that takes advantages
2013 International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Informatics and Mobile Engineering (PRIME) 12

of node density to allow nodes in dense areas to sleep for
longer period of time.
SPAN [3] proposed a protocol for maximizing the lifetime
of an Ad-hoc network by powering off the nodes for as long as
possible called Span. this author of this paper believe that a
power-save protocol should be able to send packets between
any pair of nodes in the network with minimally more delays
compared to every node being awake, as well as having nearly
as much of the total capacity as the original network. Span is
able to make decisions locally and produces a network without
considerable decreases in capacity or increases in latency.
ARA [4] The Ant Colony Based Routing Algorithm for
MANETs. In this paper we present a new on-demand routing
algorithm for mobile, multi-hop ad-hoc networks. The protocol
based on swarm intelligence and especially on the ant colony
optimization. The introduced routing protocol is highly
adaptive, efficient and scalable. The main goal in the design of
the protocol was to reduce the overhead for routing. We refer
to the protocol as the Ant-Colony-Based Routing Algorithm
(ARA).
RPEMR [5] provides reliable and power efficient multicast
routing for mobile Ad-hoc network. The swarms forward and
backward agents construct a backbone for multicasting. By
estimating the best path which connects the reliable nodes
through intermediate nodes.
Multicast Routing for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks using
Swarm Intelligence [6] multicasting as an efficient way of
providing services for group oriented application. Its involves
transmission of packets to a group nodes identified by a single
destination address.
ACO [7] The rapidly changing and unpredictable nature of
Mobile Ad-hoc networks. its wide range of challenges like
efficient routing, load congestion avoidance, energy
Consumption.
BECA/ AFECA [8] This algorithm that turn off the radio to
reduce the energy consumption with the involvement of
application level information.
III. PROPOSED WORK
A. Span Design
Span [3] adaptively elects Coordinators from all nodes in
the network. Span coordinators stay awake constantly and
perform multi-hop packet routing within the ad hoc network.
while other nodes remain in power saving mode and
periodically check if they should wake up and become a
coordinator. Span achieves four goals.
i) it ensures that enough coordinators are elected so that
every node is in radio range of at least one coordinator.

ii) it rotates the coordinators in order to ensure that all
nodes share the task of providing global connectivity roughly
equally.

iii) it attempts to minimize the number of nodes elected as
coordinators, thereby increasing network lifetime, but without
suffering a significant loss of capacity or an increase in latency.

iv) it elects coordinators using only local information in a
decentralized manner, each node only consults state stored in
local routing tables during the election process.

















For Designing a Span involves following three operations
as
1. Coordinator Election
2. Coordinator Announcements
3. Coordinator Withdraw
1) Coordinator Election
The source and destination nodes of each flow need to
continuously send and receive packets, they do not operate in
power saving mode. Thus, they routinely become coordinators.
The coordinators Selection Scheme takes such following
factor
a) The remaining battery capacity of the node and utility
of the node into consideration the remaining battery capacity is
used to ensure that stronger node.
b) The radio range of a node is a measurement of how
much more number of node connected the network would be if
that node was select as coordinator, and it is measured in how
many more pairs of neighbor nodes that would be connected if
the node was chosen as a coordinator.



Figure 1.

Source and Destination nodes

Coordinator nodes

Non-coordinator nodes
2013 International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Informatics and Mobile Engineering (PRIME) 13

2) Coordinator Announcement
The following coordinator eligibility rule in span ensures
that the entire network is covered with enough coordinators:
Coordinator Eligibility rule: if two neighbors of a non
coordinator node cannot reach each other either directly or via
one or two coordinators, the node should become a
coordinator, the node should become a coordinator.
While this election algorithm does not yield the minimum
number of coordinators required to merely maintain
connectedness, it forms a network that roughly contains a
coordinator in every populated radio range in the entire
network topology. Since packets will be routed through
coordinators, this topology ought to yield good capacity.
The Coordinator selection Implemented is by calculating a
randomized back-off delay that a regular nodes uses before
announcing itself as a new coordinator. The utility and
remaining energy are factor in this delay.
Thus, when all nodes have roughly equal energy, the above
discussion suggests a back off delay of the form.
XT
i
N R
i
N
i
C
delay *
|
|
|
|
|
.
|

\
|
+
|
|
|
|
|
.
|

\
|
|
|
.
|

\
|
=
2
1
Thus randomization is achieved by picking R uniformly at
random from the interval [0, 1].
Now consider the case when nodes may have unequal
energy left in their batteries. We observe that what matters in a
heterogeneous network is not necessarily the absolute amount
of energy available at the node, but the amount of energy that
the node can have. Let E
r
denote the amount energy (in joules)
at a node that still remains, and E
m
be a maximum amount of
energy available at the same node.A reasonable (but not the
only ) notion of fairness can be achieved by ensuring that a
node with a larger value of E
r
E
m
is more likely to volunteer
to become a coordinator more quickly than one with a smaller
ratio. Thus we need to add a decreasing function of E
r
E
m

that reflects this, to above equation .There are an simple linear
one : 1 E
r
E
m
.In addition to its simplicity , this choice is
attractive because it ensures that the rate with which a node
reduces its propensity to advertise ( as a function of the amount
of energy it has left).
Combining this above Equation yields the following
equation for the back off delay in Span :
XT
i
N R
i
N
i
C
m
E
r
E
delay *
|
|
|
|
|
.
|

\
|
+
|
|
|
|
|
.
|

\
|
|
|
.
|

\
|
+
|
|
.
|

\
|
=
2
1 1
Observe that the first term does not have a random
component; thus if a node is running low on energy, its
propensity to become a volunteer is grunted to diminish
relative to other nodes in the neighborhood with similar
neighbors.
In a network with uniform density and energy, our election
algorithm rotates coordinators among all nodes of the network.
It achieves fairness because the likelihood of becoming a
coordinator falls as a coordinator uses up its battery. In
practice, however, ad-hoc networks are rarely uniform. Our
announcement rule adapts to non-uniform topology: a node that
connects network partitions together will always be elected a
coordinator. This property preserves capacity over the lifetime
of the network. Because of Span emphasis on capacity-
preservation to the extent possible, such critical nodes will
unavoidably die before other less-critical ones. However, in a
mobile Span network , a given node is rarely stuck in such a
position, and this improves fairness dramatically.
3) Coordinator Withdrawal
Each coordinator periodically checks if it should withdraw
as a coordinator. A node should withdraw if every pairs of its
neighbors can reach each other either directly or via some other
coordinators. However, in order to also ensure fairness, after a
node has been a coordinator for some period of time, it
withdraws if every pair of neighbors nodes can reach each
other via some other neighbors, even if those neighbors are not
currently coordinators. This rule gives other neighbors a chance
to become coordinators.
B. Energy conserving Routing Algorithm
These algorithm are based on the observation presented
i) Radios commonly used for 802.11-like networks
consume nearly as substantially reduce energy consumption is
by turning the radio off.
ii) We can take advantage of information above the MAC-
layer to control how long we can keep the radio turned off.
iii) it is possible to take advantage of node density to
further conserve power.
Mobile ad-hoc networking has fostered much research in
the area of efficient routing protocols.
i) Sleep/awake approaches
In this Sleep/awake power save mode approach[2][8]
focuses on inactive time of communication. The most of
hardware devices supports low power states it is desirable to
put the radio subsystem into sleep state to save energy.
However, when all the nodes in a MANET sleep and do not
listen, data packets cannot be delivered to a destination node.
Our possible approach is to design SPAN to elect a
Coordinator node, and let it coordinate the communication on
behalf of its neighboring as non-coordinator nodes. Now, non-
coordinator nodes can safely sleep most of time saving battery
energy. Each non-coordinator node periodically wakes up and
communicates with the coordinator node to find out if it has
data to receive. In a multihop MANET, more than one
coordinator node would be required because a single
Coordinator cannot cover the entire MANET, So Multiple
Coordinators are elected.
2013 International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Informatics and Mobile Engineering (PRIME) 14












T
I
- The time that node spends listening for the activity.
T
s
- The time that a node spends sleeping.
T
a
-The period of time that nodes remain active
when no messages are being processed.
Nodes are one of three states as shown in Fig. 2 as
sleeping, listening and active. Initially, coordinator node is
in the active state. Remaining non coordinator nodes are all in
sleep state periodically goes to listening state and exchanges
discovery messages including node IDs to find the particular
destination. A node becomes a coordinator node if it does not
consider any discovery messages. If more than one node is in
listening state, one with the longest expected lifetime becomes
a coordinator.
The coordinator node remains active to handle routing for
T
a
. After T
a
, the nodes changes its state to Sleep state.In
Scenarios with high mobility, sleeping nodes should wake up
earlier to take over the role of a coordinator node. Where
Sleeping time T
s
is calculated T
s
= k T
I
where k is small
integer. Messages are then retransmitted k + 1 times.









C. Ant Colony Optimization
The packets used in the network can be divided into two
classes like data packets and control packets. Data packets
represent the information that the end-users exchange with
each other. In ant-routing, data packets use the information
stored at routing tables for travelling from the source to the
destination node. Control packets like forward ant (FANT) and
a backward ant (BANT) are used to update the routing tables
and distribute information about the traffic load in the network.
Apart from the above control packets, the neighbor control
packets are used to maintain a list of available nodes to which
packets can be forwarded. The HELLO messages are
broadcasted periodically from each node to all its neighbors. It
is necessary to check if the ant has arrived or not, as the
destination address will change at every visited node. Birth
time of an ant is the time when the ant has been generated.
Arrival time at the final destination is used to calculate the trip
time.
In the route discovery [6]phase new routes are created by
FANT and BANT. A FANT is an agent which establishes the
pheromone track to the source node. It gathers information
about the state of network. In contrast, a BANT establishes the
pheromone track to the destination node. BANTs use the
collected information to adapt the routing tables on their path.
The FANT is a small packet with a unique sequence number.
Nodes are able to distinguish duplicate packets on the basis of
the sequence number and the source address of the FANT. It
creates a set of routing agents called FANT to search for the
destination host. The source node would initiate a route
discovery mechanism when a path to destination needs to be
established. The source node would disseminate FANT to all
its one-hop neighbors. While the destination is still not found,
the neighbor would keep forwarding the FANTs to their own
neighbors and so on.
A node which receives a FANT for the first time creates a
record in its routing table which consists of destination address,
next hop, and pheromone value. The node interprets the source
address of the FANT as destination address of BANT, the
address of the previous node as the next hop, and computes the
pheromone value depending on the number of hops the FANT
needs to reach the node. Then the node relays the FANT to its
neighbors. Duplicate FANTs are identified through the unique
sequence number and destroyed by the intermediate nodes.
When the FANT reaches the destination node, the destination
node extracts the information of the FANT and destroys it.
Subsequently, it creates a BANT and sends it to the source
node. When the sender receives the BANT from the destination
node, the path is established and data packets can be sent. Ant-
E ensures that routing paths are free from loops, and does not
require extra overhead of sequence number to prevent loops.
Nodes can recognize duplicate receipt of data packets, based on
the source address and the sequence number. In route
maintenance phase, the routes need to be monitored and
strengthened during the communication. Once the FANT and
BANT have established the pheromone tracks for the source
and destination nodes, subsequent data packets are used to
maintain the path.
IV. SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT
Network simulator NS-2 is used under Linux platform to
evaluate the performance of our proposed routing protocol. We
have used the programming language C++ to code the main
routines of the routing agent, and OTCL to modify the
parameters during simulations. The nodes mobility speed is
varied as per table-1 and according to the random waypoint

Figure 2.

Figure 3.
2013 International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Informatics and Mobile Engineering (PRIME) 15

mobility model. The simulation time is set as 900 seconds. The
mobility model describes the movement pattern of mobile
nodes and each node is responsible for computing its own
position and velocity. Nodes move around as per defined
mobility model. Constant Bit Rate (CBT) is used to transfer
data packets. The simulations have been carried using the
parameters mentioned in table.
TABLE 1 gives the parameter values of ABIRP and AODV
which is used for Simulation.
TABLE I. PARAMETER VALUES OF ABIRP AND AODV
FOR SIMULATION
S. no Parameters Values
1 Area Size 1000m x 1000m
2 Transmission range 250 m
3 Number of nodes 50 Nos
4 Simulation Time 600 Sec
5 Nodes Mobility 1.5,10,15.20 m/s
7 Data rate 1 Kbps
8 No.of Expriments 5 times

V. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION PARAMETERS
The following metrics are often chosen to compare the
Performance of various routing protocols:
A. Energy Efficiency
We Compute the energy consumed in the simulation and
compute how much lower this is than the same simulation
with unmodified AODV. We calculate the percentage energy
saved as (E

E
s
)E

where E

is the total energy
consumption for unmodified AODV and ABIRP.
B. End to End delay
This includes all possible delays caused by buffering
during route discovery latency, queuing at the interfaces,
queuing transmission delays and propagation and transfer
times of data packets. This is the average overall delay for a
packet to traverse from a source node to a destination node.
So, Average-End-to-End-Delay of routing protocol is
calculated as:
P
e
delay to End

=
Where
s
T
d
T e =
I
d
= Time when received at distance
I
s
= Time when created by source
P = Iotol pockct
C. Packet Delivery Ratio
It is the percentage of ratio between the number of packets
sent by sources and the number of received packets at the
sinks or destination.
PR =

No. o Rccci:cJ pockct

No. o pockct scnJ by sourcc
1uu

This performance evaluation parameter measures
effectiveness, reliability and efficiency of a protocol. In this
paper exhaustive simulation experiments are carried out with
different mobility rates for comparison among ABIRP, and
AODV.
VI. RESULTS
In this paper, local retransmission is used to improve the
Energy Efficiency of ABIRP. Reliability and effectiveness of
proposed routing protocol. Retransmission made from
neighboring nodes of source node to destination instead of
original source node. Thus, the total overhead is reduced to
some extent. Though it is expected to produce high overhead
and take more end-to-end delay for the proposed routing
protocol, controlled flooding and resuming its route discovery
process from where it left in the previous round following a
failure to discover a route to the destination node. It shows
improved Energy Efficiency and reliability, effectiveness and
efficiency of ABIRP comparison to AODV.

























Figure 4. Packet interval VS Average Energy Consumption

Figure 5. Packet Interval VS PDR
2013 International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Informatics and Mobile Engineering (PRIME) 16




































VII. CONCLUSION
This paper, a new routing protocol for MANET
environment is proposed based on Ant Colony Optimization
principle coupled with other intelligent techniques. The
proposed ABIRP algorithm improves the Energy efficiency,
robustness and reliability. The efficiency of proposed routing
protocol ABIRP is shown to better than other demand routing
protocols AODV .The proposed ABIRP routing protocol uses a
optimal path routing and fast route discovery. The Established
paths provide reliable, Shorter and faster communication.
Simulation results show that the proposed protocol provides
reliable and power Efficient routing. by attaining high packet
delivery ratio and low energy consumption compared to the
existing protocol.
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Figure 6. Packet Interval VS Throughput

Figure 7. Packet Interval VS End-to-End Delay