An ACO and position information based intelligent QoS routing mechanism in MANET

Abstract Quality of service (QoS) routing technology, which can find the available route, is an important way to realize the end-to-end QoS provisioning for networks. Intelligent routing discovery, establishment and maintenance, which take use of ant colony algorithm, have been widely researched in the past years. But the ant colony algorithm has two obvious shortcomings, which are low convergence rate and algorithm stagnation in local optimum. As the topology of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is always changing, the information of network status is hard to collect in time. So the enhancement of the convergence rate of the QoS routing algorithm is quite important in MANETs. Based on the AntHocNet algorithm previously designed for ad hoc networks, this paper proposes a position-based intelligent QoS routing algorithm. The position constraints are added in the procedures of tabu list forming and pheromone updating. Compared with AntHocNet, the proposed mechanism can greatly reduce the convergence rate in the premises of searching an available path with QoS guarantee according to the simulation results.