Performance Analysis of Quality of Service Enabled Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm Using Ant Colony Optimization in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) are collection of mobile hosts dynamically forming a temporary network without the aid of any existing infrastructure or centralized control. Quality of Service (QoS) support for MANET is a challenging task due to the dynamic topology and limited resources. Routing in MANET depends on intermediate nodes. The existing QoS based routing solutions for MANET involves with single metric or two metrics. It is important that MANETs should provide QoS support routing such as acceptable delay, jitter and energy in case of multimedia and real time applications. The metrics selection can be from additive or multiplicative or concave or combination of the above. This paper proposes a QoS enabled Temporally Ordered Routing Algorithm (TORA) protocol using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) called AntTORA. ACO technique is used in this protocol to optimize multiple QoS routing metrics like delay, jitter and energy. Ant-like agents are used in this algorithm to discover and maintain paths with the specified QoS requirements. The performance of TORA and AntTORA are analyzed using network simulator-2. AntTORA produces better performance than TORA in the terms of end-to-end delay, energy, jitter and throughput.