A time-aware resource search strategy with the ant colony optimization in MANETs

With the increasing application of mobile devices, such as smart phones, the mobile ad hoc networks (i.e. MANETs) have been a hot research topic, in which how to effectively and efficiently search resources in MANETs attracts much attention. Due to peers’ short wireless transmission range and strong mobility, the existing approaches suffer from the problem of lower search efficiency. This paper proposes a resource search strategy with the ant colony optimization, tieSearch, where we use the time-aware neighbor peer’s availability and the time-aware neighbor peer’s resource preferences as the pheromones to guide the ants to the holders of the requested resources under the finding that most peers’ movements change regularly on a daily basis in the MANET environments. We detail the calculations of the abovementioned two types of pheromones, including their initial value settings, their increment updates and their attenuations. Also, we discuss the handling approach to alleviate the impact of peers’ random churn on the resource search efficiency. The simulation results show that the tieSearch strategy outperforms other strategies in terms of the successful search rate, the traffic overhead and the search time.