Pheromone-aided robust multipath and multipriority routing in wireless MANETs

Abstract

In this paper, we present an ant-based multipath routing protocol that considers both energy and latency. Energy efficiency is an important issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) since node energy supplies are stored in batteries. In order to increase the network lifetime it is important to maximize the minimum node energy along the path. As the network topology changes, failures may occur on active routes, resulting in the need for new route discoveries if only single routes per flow are maintained. Frequent new route discovery would, however, increase routing overhead and increase mean and peak packet latency. Using multiple routes simultaneously per flow can be a solution to these problems. In a multipath context, we consider mobile ad-hoc communication networks with dual-priority traffic: latency-critical and not latency-critical. For latency-critical traffic, energy-pheromone and delay-pheromone metrics are combined after being normalized so that their respective significance is preserved. For not latency-critical traffic, only energy-pheromone metrics are used.