Optimization in Stagnation Avoidance of ACO based Routing of Multimedia Traffic over Hybrid MANETs

Abstract

As the world is moving towards wireless devices, the demand for more and more IP based multimedia services is growing. Network routing refers to the activities necessary to guide IP based packets in its travel from source to destination nodes. Routing becomes more complicated for MANET architecture, due to the changing topology and the dynamic behavior of the nodes. The delivery of multimedia requires QoS provisioning at various layers of OSI. Routing in general is a NP problem, and when it for multimedia traffic over MANETS, it is all the more a complicated optimization problem. Hence, a hybrid architecture for a more conditioned routing over MANET is proposed in this paper. The protocol needs to be adaptive, flexible, and intelligent for efficient network management. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a characterization of Swarm Intelligence (SI) that is highly suitable for adaptive routing solutions to such volatile network. In this paper, we propose Hybrid architecture for routing with more than one QoS parameters. ACO algorithm may suffer from stagnation, due to which, the exploration probability for new paths is reduced. Hence, the proposed work also minimizes the stagnation issue. The Multimedia traffic prioritization algorithms sets the priority to minimize playback delay and jitter by giving the highest priority to I-frames since its losses leads to multiplicative effect on the Video Quality.