Parallelized ACO based Routing for Stagnation Mitigation and Avoidance of Multimedia Traffic Over MANETs

Abstract

Ant Colony Optimization is a meta-heuristic, suitable for routing in MANETs because the algorithm is fully distributed, self-organizing, fault tolerant and intrinsically adapts to changing traffic patterns. However, since the best path is preferred for routing over longer period of time, the exploratory behaviour of the ants may be affected and same path may be selected for longer period of time. In this paper, we have reviewed various techniques that can be used for stagnation control and avoidance Some of them are like Pheromone control [5,7,8], Pheromone heuristics control [9], Privileged pheromone laying [7,12], Multiple ant colony optimization [8,9] and Multiple path routing [11] techniques. We have also presented a comparative analysis of these schemes for stagnation avoidance. Towards the later part of the paper, we propose a scheme to improve the exploratory behaviour of ants, by parallel releasing two streams of forward ants along the path from source to destination. The technique has shown major improvement in the Packet drops and throughput. It is also mentioned that the technique will improve the quality of multimedia routed through MANETs, due to the multipath based enhancments.