ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION BASED MODIFIED TERMITE ALGORITHM (MTA) WITH EFFICIENT STAGNATION AVOIDANCE STRATEGY FOR MANETS

Designing an effective load balancing algorithm is difficult due to Dynamic topology of MANET. To address the problem, a load balancing routing algorithm namely Modified Termite Algorithm (MTA) has been developed based on ant’s food foraging behavior. Stability of the link is determined based on node stability factor ‘�’. The stability factor “ � “of the node is the ratio defined between the “hello sent” and “hello replied” by a node to its neighbors. This also indicates the link stability in relation to other paths towards the destination. A higher ratio of “�” indicates that the neighbor node is more stable. Using this concept pheromone evaporation for the stable node is fine tuned such that if the ratio “ �” is more, the evaporation is slow and if “ �” is less the evaporation is faster. This leads to decreasing of the pheromone content in an optimal path which may result in congestion. These paths can be avoided using efficient evaporation technique. The MTA developed by adopting efficient pheromone evaporation technique will address the load balancing problems and expected to enhance the performance of the network in terms of throughput, and reduces End-to-end delay and Routing overheads.