Performance Evaluation of Ant Colony Optimization Based RoutingAlgorithms for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Network is a collection of autonomous mobile nodes that communicate with each other over wireless links without any fixed infrastructure. The nodes use the service of other nodes in the network to transmit packets to destinations that are out of their range. Such networks are expected to play increasingly important role in future organizations, University, Civilian and Military settings, being useful for providing communication support where no fixed infrastructure exists. Also, in case of disaster or natural calamities, the deployment of a fixed infrastructure is neither feasible nor economically profitable for establishing communication among the rescue members. In order to accomplish this, a number of routing protocols are being proposed by researchers. Ants based routing is gaining more popularity because of its adaptive and dynamic nature. A number of Swarm Intelligence (SI) based, more specially Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based routing algorithms are proposed by researchers. Each one is based on different characteristics and properties. In this paper, we take up three ACO based algorithms and simulate the proposed algorithms using NS-2 and compare the performance matrices as Packet Delivery Fraction (PDF), throughput and routing overhead for varying simulation time.