A Pheromone-Aided Multipath QoS Routing Protocol and its Applications in MANETs

Abstract

In this paper, we present an ant-based multipath QoS routing protocol that utilizes a single link metric combining multiple weighted criteria. The metric is applied to the proposed energy efficient multipath algorithm that considers both energy and latency. Energy efficiency is an important issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) since node energy supplies are stored in batteries. In order to increase the network lifetime it is important to maximize the minimum node energy along a path. As the network topology changes, failures may occur on active routes, resulting in the need for new route discoveries if only single routes per flow are maintained. Frequent new route discovery would, however, increase routing overhead and increase mean and peak packet latency. Using multiple routes simultaneously per flow can be a solution to these problems. Also, a special case of the multipath QoS routing protocol that considers throughput is applied to a security context. A compromised node can obstruct network communication by simply dropping packets that are supposed to be forwarded. In our approach, messages are distributed over multiple paths between source and destination using ant-based QoS routing. In proportion to the throughput of each path, a pheromone-aided routing table is updated and, subsequently, paths that contain malicious nodes are naturally avoided.

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