A cross-layer design and ant-colony optimization based load-balancing routing protocol for ad-hoc networks

Abstract

In order to periodically reassess the status of the alternate path route (APR) set and to improve the efficiency of alternate path construction existing in most current alternate path routing protocols, we present a cross-layer design and ant-colony optimization based load-balancing routing protocol for ad-hoc networks (CALRA) in this paper. In CALRA, the APR set maintained in nodes is aged and reassessed by the inherent mechanism of pheromone evaporation of ant-colony optimization algorithm, and load balance of network is achieved by ant-colony optimization combining with cross-layer synthetic optimization. The efficiency of APR set construction is improved by bidirectional and hop-by-hop routing update during routing discovery and routing maintenance process. Moreover, ants in CALRA deposit simulated pheromones as a function of multiple parameters corresponding to the information collected by each layer of each node visited, such as the distance from their source node, the congestion degree of the visited nodes, the current pheromones the nodes possess, the velocity of the nodes, and so on, and provide the information to the visiting nodes to update their pheromone tables by endowing the different parameters corresponding to different information and different weight values, which provides a new method to improve the congestion problem, the shortcut problem, the convergence rate and the heavy overheads commonly existed in existing ant-based routing protocols for ad-hoc networks. The performance of the algorithm is measured by the packet delivery rate, good-put ratio (routing overhead), and end-to-end delay. Simulation results show that CALRA performs well in decreasing the route overheads, balancing traffic load, as well as increasing the packet delivery rate, etc.