Transient chaotic neural network-based disjoint multipath routing for mobile ad-hoc networks

Due to mobility of wireless hosts, routing in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) is a challenging task. Multipath routing is employed to provide reliable communication, load balancing, and improving quality of service of MANETs. Multiple paths are selected to be node-disjoint or link-disjoint to improve transmission reliability. However, selecting an optimal disjoint multipath set is an NP-complete problem. Neural networks are powerful tools for a wide variety of combinatorial optimization problems. In this study, a transient chaotic neural network (TCNN) is presented as multipath routing algorithm in MANETs. Each node in the network can be equipped with a neural network, and all the network nodes can be trained and used to obtain optimal or sub-optimal high reliable disjoint paths. This algorithm can find both node-disjoint and link-disjoint paths with no extra overhead. The simulation results show that the proposed method can find the high reliable disjoint path set in MANETs. In this paper, the performance of the proposed algorithm is compared to the shortest path algorithm, disjoint path set selection protocol algorithm, and Hopfield neural network (HNN)-based model. Experimental results show that the disjoint path set reliability of the proposed algorithm is up to 4.5 times more than the shortest path reliability. Also, the proposed algorithm has better performance in both reliability and the number of paths and shows up to 56% improvement in path set reliability and up to 20% improvement in the number of paths in the path set. The proposed TCNN-based algorithm also selects more reliable paths as compared to HNN-based algorithm in less number of iterations.