EMP-DSR: An Enhanced Multi-path Dynamic Source Routing Algorithm for MANETs Based on Ant Colony Optimization

Routing in MANETs becomes a more sophisticated issue especially when a certain QoS requirement is to be satisfied. One of the most important QoS metrics is end-to-end reliability. Multi-path routing can be considered as an effective method to support end-to-end reliability. However, the path discovery in current multi-path routing algorithms considering reliability relies mostly on local link availability information at intermediate nodes to perform the route request message forwarding. Selecting a reliable link at an intermediate node solely based on local information may not necessarily lead to finding a satisfactory reliable end-to-end path. To mitigate this problem, in this paper we have proposed an Enhanced Multi-Path Dynamic Source Routing Algorithm (EMP-DSR) which is an enhanced version of MP-DSR. The proposed method uses an ant-colony optimization method to provide global information. The simulation results show that the EMP-DSR outperforms MP-DSR both in finding reliable paths and end-to-end delay with a little tolerable overhead.