An efficient routing algorithm based on ant colony optimisation for VANETs

The Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET), which are essentially the subset of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) have been focused in the recent years mainly for the research and development of the Intelligent Transport Systems having the ability for both self-management and also self-organization, making them reliable as a highly mobile network system Also, the disconnection of such high mobile nodes will be a problem in VANET structure, where the loss of information will be critical because the vehicles/nodes in a VANET can move at a speed of 300 km/h or 186.41 miles/h. The protocols suggested earlier used a fixed topology for the mobile nodes in VANET. Even though the scientists had proposed different algorithms like beaconing, greedy or moving directional approach, the environmental changes were ignored which usually play an important criterion in regulation of information. In this paper, we propose a bio-inspired meta-heuristic and mathematically probabilistic technique of the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) where efficient path establishment and information transfer can be achieved. Path availability and the delay time have been used for the evaluation of discovered paths. But, here the real time environmental changes were taken into account and the performance was measured in accordance with ACO. The technical software for VANET implementation using modifications in the ACO was implemented in the Matrix Laboratory (MATLAB)-2015b simulator along with the different randomized changes in environmental conditions. The random movements of the ants have displayed an efficient means for the delivery of packets to the maximum number of available nodes/vehicles in the network with very low latency. So that even if accidental failure of any node occurs, the surrounding ant neighbors will carry the required information to the desired nodes resulting in improvement of the throughput. Thus, the results obtained through various environmental modifications indicated that the use of randomized ACO algorithm for a highly mobile VANET system offers a much higher performance as compared to other earlier suggested on demand methods and can be realized commercially. Hence, this project tries to become a state of art technology for the benefit of society and the country.