Review of Ant Based Multicast Routing Protocols for MANET

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) is an infrastructureless network with a set of dynamic, mobile and self-organizing nodes. Several methods have been proposed as solutions to the challenges associated with MANETs inspired by the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. ACO is a nature inspired algorithm based on the foraging behavior of ants. Ants have been found to discover the shortest path from their nest to food over time using very adaptive means. Multicast provides an efficient way of dissemination of data from a sender to a group of receivers. One interesting research area in MANET is multicast routing. Due to the adaptive and dynamic nature, ant based multicast routing algorithms are gaining more importance in routing. This has led to development of many different ant based multicast routing protocols for MANETs. It is quite difficult to determine which protocols may perform best under frequent node mobility, varying number of nodes, dynamic topology, diverse link capacities, various group and packet size, limited practical bandwidth of the shared wireless channel and the battery power availability. Consequently, it becomes necessary for MANETs to have an efficient multicast routing based on ACO and a Quality of Service (QoS) mechanism. In this paper, we have provided an overview of a wide range of ant based multicast routing protocols proposed in the literature.