AGRA: An Efficient Ant Colony Grid-based Routing Algorithm for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) present unique challenges in terms of dynamic topology and limited resources, necessitating the use of efficient routing algorithms to guarantee reliable communication. This study proposes AGRA (Ant Colony Grid-based Routing Algorithm), a novel algorithm that integrates the advantages of ant colony optimisation (ACO) and grid-based routing to improve the routing performance in MANETs. The proposed algorithm employs the swarm intelligence of ant colonies to explore the network and identify optimal paths, while the grid-based structure improves scalability and reduces latency. The proposed protocol is found to outperform extant routing protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), end-to-end delay (E2ED), network throughput (NT), and energy efficiency (EE) as determined by extensive simulations evaluating performance. AGRA achieves PDR of 98%, E2ED of 0.9s, NT of 86 KB/s, and EE of 35.23%, making it appropriate for a variety of applications, such as emergency response systems and military communications.