A novel ant-based QoS routing for mobile adhoc networks

Quality of service support for MANETs is a challenging task due to dynamic topology and limited resources. The main purpose of QoS routing is to find a feasible path that has sufficient resources to satisfy the constraints. In this paper a novel QoS routing algorithm based on ant colony optimization is proposed. The proposed algorithm uses Ant-like agents to discover and maintain paths, that satisfy more requirements of the incoming traffic and at the same time by control energy level of nodes, increase lifetime of network as much as possible. Simulation results show that our algorithm can obviously improve packet delivery ratio, lifetime of network and reduce end-to-end delay.