Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are built up of a collection of mobile nodes which have no fixed infrastructure. The nodes communicate through wireless network and there is no central control. Routing is the task of directing data packets from a source node to a given destination. This task is particularly complex due to the dynamic topology, limited process and storing capability, bandwidth constraints and lack of the central control. Ants routing resembles basic mechanisms from distributed Swarm Intelligence (SI) in biological systems and turns out to become an appealing solution when routing becomes a crucial problem in a complex network scenario, where traditional routing techniques either fail completely or at least face intractable complexity. Ants based routing is gaining more popularity because of its adaptive and dynamic nature. A number of Swarm Intelligence (SI) based, more specially Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based routing algorithms are proposed by researchers. In this paper, we discuss the basic routing technique of biological insects like ants and present an overview of all the ACO based proposed routing algorithms.

Key words: Swarm intelligence (SI), mobile ad hoc network (MANET), ant colony optimization (ACO), autonomy.