Secure and energy efficient MANET routing incorporating trust values using hybrid ACO

Routing in a MANET varies considerably from the other networks due to the fact that MANET, being an ad-hoc network does not follow a specific topology and the nodes are dynamic. Further, power consumption is another major aspect, which needs to be kept in check, as the depleted nodes tend to become selfish. This paper presents a Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization based routing algorithm that generates routes dynamically, following the concept of equal load distribution in the network. The local search component of ACO is modified using Simulated Annealing to provide an effective and energy efficient node selection mechanism. Experiments show that the algorithm exhibits effective load distributions and also provides dynamic random paths.