2012 International Conference on Computing Sciences

Performance Evaluation Of AntHocNet Routing Algorithm in Ad Hoc Networks

T.Nishitha, P.Chenna Reddy

Computer Science and Engineering
JNTUACEP
Pulivendula, India
e-mail: naishi.123@gmail.com, pcreddy1@rediffmail.com

Abstract—Ad hoc wireless multi-hop networks (AHWMNs)
are communication networks that consist of wireless nodes,
placed together in an ad hoc manner, i.e. with minimal prior
planning. All nodes in the network have routing capabilities and
forward data packets for other nodes in multi-hop fashion.
AHWMNs pose substantially different challenges to routing
protocols than more traditional wired networks. AHWMN
routing protocols are classified as topology-based, position-based
and bio-inspired routing protocols. Topology-based routing
protocols use the information about the links that exist in the
network to perform packet forwarding. Position-based routing
algorithms require information about the physical position of the
participating node. Bio-inspired networks are one engineering
field which has many parallels with biology and hence the
solutions of biology can be used to solve the problems of
computer networks.
Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a metaheuristic inspired by
the shortest path searching behaviour of various ant species. Ant
Colony Optimization (ACO) routing algorithm is one of the
adaptive and efficient routing algorithms for AHWMNs. In ACO
routing algorithms, ant-like agents traverse the network to search
a path from source to destination, and lay down pheromone on
the path. A data packet is transferred along a path selected with
probability based on the amount of pheromone.
AntHocNet is based on Ant Colony Optimization technique. It is
a hybrid algorithm that combines a reactive route setup process
with a proactive route maintenance process. The reactive route
setup is carried out at the start of a communication session or
whenever the source of a current session has no more routing
information available for the destination. The proactive route
maintenance is run for the entire duration of the session. Its aim
is to keep information about existing routes up to date and
explore new routes. In this paper performance of AntHocNet
with the Ad hoc On demand distance Vector (AODV) routing
protocol and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol is
compared.
Keywords-
Ant,AHWMN,AntHocNet,Performance,AODV,DSR.
I. INTRODUCTION
An ad hoc wireless multi-hop network (AHWMNs) is a
collection of mobile devices which form a communication
network with no pre-existing wiring or infrastructure.
Routing in AHWMNs is challenging since there is no central
coordinator that manage routing decisions. AHWMN routing
protocols are classified as topology-based, position-based
and bio-inspired routing protocols.
Figure 1. Classification of routing protocols.
Topology-based routing protocols use the information
about the links that exist in the network to perform packet
forwarding. They can be further divided into proactive,
reactive and hybrid approaches.
Proactive algorithms employ classical routing strategies
such as distance- vector routing (e.g. DSDV) or link-state
routing (e.g. OLSR). They maintain routing information
about the available paths in the network even if these paths
are currently not used. The main drawback of these
approaches is the maintenance of unusual path may occupy a
significant part of the available bandwidth if the topology of
the network changes frequently.
Reactive routing protocols such as AODV and DSR
maintain only the routes that are currently in use and hence
reduce the burden on the network. However, they still have
some inherent limitations. First, since the routes are
maintained only while in use, it is required to perform a route
discovery before packets are exchanged between
communication nodes. Second, even though route discovery
is restricted to the routes currently in use, it may still
generate a significant amount of network traffic when the
topology of the network changes frequently.
Hybrid ad hoc routing protocols such as ZRP combine
local proactive routing and global reactive routing in order to
achieve a higher level of efficiency and scalability. However,

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DOI 10.1109/ICCS.2012.58
even a combination of both strategies still needs to maintain
at least those network paths that are currently in use, limiting
the amount of topological changes that can be tolerated
within a given amount of time.
Position-based routing algorithms eliminate some of the
limitations of topology-based routing by using additional
information. They require information about the physical
position of participating nodes.
Routing of packets in AHWMNs with a large number of
nodes or with high mobility is a very difficult task and
current routing protocols do not really scale well with these
scenarios. Bio-inspired routing protocols solve this problem.
These protocols can solve problems like Traveling Salesmen
Problem, the vehicular routing problem, the graph colorings
problem, the shortest common super-sequence problem, the
multiple knapsack problems, the bin packing problem, the
2D HP protein folding problem, etc...
The Ant colony optimization (ACO) is based on the
foraging behavior of ants. When ants search for food, they
wander randomly and upon finding food return to their
colony while laying a chemical substance called pheromone.
Many ants may travel through different routes to the same
food source. The ants, which travel the shortest path,
reinforce the path with more pheromone that aids other ants
to follow. Subsequently more ants are attracted by this
pheromone trail, which reinforces the path even more. This
autocatalytic behavior quickly identifies the shortest path.
Ants are simple autonomous agents that interact via indirect
communication known as stigmergy. Stigmergy is an
indirect form of communication where individual agents
leave signals in the environment and other agents sense them
to drive their own behavior. This form of communication is
local wherein simple agents interact locally without having
any global information.
Since these bio-inspired networks are scalable, it will be
helpful for further research also.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
The robustness and efficiency of the collective behaviors
of insect societies with respect to variations of environment
conditions is a key aspect of their biological success.
Because of these same properties, they have recently become
a source of inspiration for the design of routing algorithms
for dynamic networks. Ant algorithms are differed according
to how pheromone is updated, how routing table
probabilities are calculated, how often and how many ants
sent for request. A number of different ACO algorithms for
adaptive routing have been proposed.
The first of these were Ant-based control (ABC). ABC
Routing was developed for wired telecommunication
networks and it assumes symmetric path costs between
nodes. Ants move from node to node, selecting the next node
to move to according to the probabilities in the pheromone
tables for their destination node. When an ant arrives at a
node, the entry in the pheromone table corresponding to the
node from which the ant has just come is increased. When
ants have reached their destination, they die. The ants get
delayed on parts of the system that are heavily used. Some
noise can be added to avoid freezing of pheromone trails.
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ARA works in an on demand way. It sets up multiple
paths between source and destination. At the start of the data
session, FANTS (Forward ants) will be broadcasted by
sender to all its neighbors. Each FANT has a unique
sequence number to avoid duplicates. A node receiving a
FANT for the first time creates a record consists of
destination address, next hop, pheromone value in its routing
table. The node interprets the source address of the FANT as
destination address, the address of the previous node as next
hop, and computes the pheromone value depending on the
number of hops the FANT needed to reach the node. When
the FANT reaches destination, the destination node extracts
the information and then destroys the FANT. A BANT
(Backward ANT) is created and sent towards the source
node, the path is established and data packets are sent. Data
packets are used to maintain the path, so overhead is
reduced.
AntNet is an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)
metaheuristic for data network routing proposed by Gianni
Di Caro and Marco Dorigo. It was developed for packet
switched wired networks. In this, at regular intervals of time,
from every network nose s, a forward ant fs->d is sent
toward a destination d to discover a feasible, low-cost path to
that node, and to investigate the load status of the network
along the path. While traveling towards their destination
nodes, the forward ants keep memory of their paths and of
the traffic conditions found. When an ant reaches a node that
is already in memory, a cycle is detected and all the nodes
until this recurrent node are deleted from the ant’s memory.
When the destination node d is reached, the agent Fs->d
generates a backward ant Bd->s, transfers to it all its
memory, and is deleted. The backward ant takes the same
path as that of its corresponding forward ant, but in the
opposite direction. The backward ant updates the traffic and
the pheromone value for all the entries corresponding to the
destination node d.
AntNet–FA is an adoption of AntNet, proposed by the
same authors of original algorithm. It is very similar to
original AntNet, but contains an improvement in behavior of
forward ants: AntNet-FA's forward ants do not use the same
queues as data packets, but instead take high priority queues
like backward ants. The trip times experienced by the
forward ants are therefore no longer representative for what
can be expected for data packets; the trip time for data
packets are instead calculated by the backward ants as the
sum of local estimates maintained in each of the intermediate
nodes. The main advantage of this approach is that ants can
travel faster so that updates are done more in real-time.
Routing By Ants (RBA) uses virtual circuits and supports
both unicast and multicast routing. RBA has similarities both
with ABC and AntNet. An interesting difference with these
two algorithms is the fact that the parameters which define
how routing decisions are derived from pheromone values
are carried inside the ants, so that they can be different for
each ant. These parameters are assigned to ants in their
source node and are calculated using a genetic algorithm
(GA).
Probabilistic Emergent Routing Algorithm (PERA)
algorithm works in an on-demand way, with ants being
broadcast towards the destination at the start of a data DSR at data rates 1Mb,10Mb,100Mb and 1000Mb in UDP
session. Multiple paths are set up, but only the one with the environment
highest pheromone value is used by data and the other paths
are available for backup. The route discovery and
maintenance is done by flooding the network with ants. Both
forward and backward ants are used to fill the routing tables
with probabilities. By using these probabilities, a neighbor
will forward a packet to the given destination. Neighbors are
discovered using HELLO messages, but entries will be
inserted in the routing table are after receiving a backward
ant from the destination node.
AntHocNet is a hybrid algorithm, containing both
reactive and proactive elements. The algorithm is reactive in
the sense that it only gathers routing information about
destinations that are involved in communication sessions. It
is proactive in the sense that it tries to maintain and improve
information about existing paths while the communication
session is going on (unlike purely reactive algorithms, which
do not search for routing information until the currently
known routes are no longer valid). Routing information is Figure 2. Packet Delivery Ratio at 1 Mb data rate
stored in pheromone tables that are similar to the ones used
in other ACO routing algorithms. Forwarding of control and
data packets is done in a stochastic way, using these tables.
Link failures are dealt with using specific reactive
mechanisms, such as local route repair and the use of
warning message.

III. SIMULATION

A. Methodology
To test and compare the performance of AntHocNet
protocol, the network simulator NS-2, version 2.34 is used.
The network model used in simulation is composed by
mobile nodes and links that are considered wireless. Each
node considered as communication end-point is host and a
forwarding unit is router.
In addition to NS-2, a set of tools, mainly Bash scripts Figure 3. Packet Delivery Ratio at 10 Mb data rate
and AWK filters, to post-process the output trace files
generated by the simulator are developed. In order to
evaluate the performance, multiple experiments have been
set up.
B. Metrics
The metrics that are used for comparing the AntHocNet,
AODV, DSR routing protocols are Packet Delivery Ratio
and End-to-End Packet Delay.

1) Packet Delivery Ratio: This is the ratio of total no of

packets successfully received by the destination nodes to
number of packets sent by the source nodes throughout the
simulation.
2) End-to-End Packet Delay: It is the cumulative
statistical measure of the delays experienced by packets
travelling between source and destination.
C. Simulation Results Figure 4. Packet Delivery Ratio at 100 Mb data rate
The following results shows the Packet Delivery Ratio
and End-to-End Packet Delay of AntHocNet, AODV and

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Figure 5. Packet Delivery Ratio at 1000 Mb data rate Figure 8. End-to-End Packet Delay at 100 Mb data rate

Figure 6. End-to-End Packet Delay at 1 Mb data rate

Figure 9. End-to-End Packet Delay at 1000 Mb data rate

The following table shows the packet delivery ratio of

AntHocNet, AODV and DSR in static environment with six
nodes for TCP at window sizes 8, 16, 32.

Figure 7. End-to-End Packet Delay at 10 Mb data rate

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TABLE I. PACKET DELIVERY RATIO IN TCP AT WINDOW SIZES IV. CONCLUSIONS
8,16,32.
Simulation results demonstrate the scalability of
TCP AntHocNet when compared to AODV and DSR i.e.,
AntHocNet AntHocNet performs better at high data rates and at large
Window Size Sent Received Packet Delivery
Ratio
number of nodes. Its performance is inferior to that of
8 3887 3886 0.9997 AODV and DSR at low data rates and at less number of
16 3897 3887 0.9974 nodes. From this it can be concluded that AntHocNet is
32 3910 3888 0.9944 suggested for large-scale, high data rate networks. As the
AODV
8 3893 3891 0.9995
number of nodes increases, the performance of AODV and
16 3900 3890 0.9974 DSR deteriorates whereas AntHocNet’s performance
32 3904 3894 0.9974 increases even with the increase in the number of nodes. At
DSR high data rates also AODV and DSR has very low
8 3787 3786 0.9997 performance and it deteriorates rapidly. But for AntHocNet,
16 3797 3787 0.9937
32 3806 3785 0.9944
its performance is either constant or increases at high data
rates.
REFERENCES
TABLE II. PACKET DELIVERY RATIO IN UDP AT DATA RATES 1
MB,10 MB, 100 MB [1] Frederic Ducatelle, (2007) “Adaptive Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc
Multi-Hop Networks”.
[2] R.M. Sharma, “Performance Comparison of AODV, DSR and
UDP
AntHocNet Protocols”, Department of
AntHocNet
Data Rate Sent Received Packet Delivery
Computer Engineering, NIT Kurukshetra
Ratio [3] FJ Arbona Benat, (2006) “Simulation of Ant Routing Protocol for
1 Mb 12501 3339 0.2671 Ad-hoc networks in NS-2”
10 Mb 125001 3237 0.02589 [4] Azzedine Boukerche, Begumhan Turgut, “Routing
100 Mb 1250001 3236 0.002589 protocols in ad hoc networks: A survey”
AODV
1 Mb 12501 3345 0.2676 [5] S. L. Ho, Shiyou Yang, H. C. Wong. “An Improved Ant Colony
10 Mb 125001 3345 0.02676 Optimization Algorithm and Its Application to Electromagnetic
100 Mb 1250001 3345 0.002676 Devices Designs”. Hong Kong Polytechnic University. March 14,
DSR
2009.
1 Mb 12501 3343 0.2674 [6] Christian Blum, “Ant colony optimization Introduction and recent
10 Mb 125001 3342 0.02673 trends” Universitat Politècnica deCatalunya, Spain, October 11 2005.
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