Honeybee-Inspired Quality Monitoring of Routing Paths in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper discusses BeeIP, a reactive multipath routing protocol inspired by honeybees, and examines its performance for both connection-oriented and connectionless traffic within mobile ad hoc networks using a new modification to the algorithm for artificial swarming. Artificial agents follow concepts borrowed from the communication and foraging activities of real honeybees to detect new routing paths and maintain successful and robust data traffic. Paths are evaluated by constantly monitoring their quality based on a list of well-defined low-level parameters. The protocol is compared with the state-of-the-art DSR, AODV and its multipath version AOMDV using four benchmark performance metrics for both TCP and UDP traffic. The results suggest that BeeIP is able to achieve high packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and average receiving throughput, while it is shown second best in terms of control overhead for both transport layer protocols.