On-Demand Clustering Routing Protocol in Ant-Based Algorithm Using WCDS for MANET

Swarm intelligence is one of the popular approaches that have increased the development of new approaches that can increase the network efficiency. Swarm intelligence imitates the collective behaviour of some biological species to solve the network routing problems. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) comes under the swarm intelligence approach. This paper aims at increasing the network efficiency by decreasing the overhead required to send the routing packets. Ant Colony Optimization is designed to find a better routing path by continually issuing routing packets (ants) to leave the pheromone information on the path from the source to the destination, so that ACO could maintain the routing path according to the pheromone trail. Weakly Connected Dominating Sets (WCDS) construction scheme is implemented as an auxiliary structure in ACO to cluster network nodes and achieve an efficient packet transmission. The Forward Ant is broadcasted only by the cluster heads thus reducing the overhead required to transmit ant packets. The Backward Ant uses the pseudo-random-proportional-selection strategy to select a best path from source to destination to increase the network efficiency. The performance of this protocol is compared with AODV and it is analyzed in terms of throughput and packet delivery ratio.