Bandwidth Constrained Routing of Multimedia Traffic over Hybrid MANETs using Ant Colony Optimization

Abstract

As the world is moving towards wireless devices, the support for more and more multimedia based applications over communication network is the need of the day. The bandwidth for data transfer, comes with a price, and we need to support a large number of bandwidth hungry applications. Hence, Quality of Service(QoS) is a key word for the overall optimize usage of the available network resources. Mobile Adhoc networks are known for their self organizing, autonomous nature. QoS based routing over MANET requires an adaptive and fast solution to path search problems. Swarm Intelligence, is a machine learning technique, where we derive intelligence from the collective behavior of natural agents. This scheme has been reflected in the Ant based algorithm, which are specialized in optimization of routing solution. Hence, in this paper we propose the implementation of protocol HMQAnt(Hybrid Multipath QoS Ant), ACO based solution with hybrid adhoc routing strategy for a hierarchical MANET architecture, so as to give optimum solution for adaptive and dynamically changing networks. We have mainly concentrated on bandwidth optimization as a key to provide effective paths for multimedia networks. This algorithm would eventually decrease the overhead and route according the bandwidth requirement. The proposed routing solution also takes queuing theory into consideration. In MANETs, whenever there is a connection loss, routing is carried out again, and it is drastically affected by queuing.