Regional Route Maintenance Protocol Based on Local Pheromone Diffusion for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Route maintenance protocol has a tradeoff between the amount of control overhead and the provision of useful alternative paths. To break through this tradeoff, we consider a bio-inspired approach based on the natural phenomena of ant pheromone. The pheromone is accumulated on the shortest path between the nest and the food, and then diffused into its vicinity over time. Thus, the ants can find another route along this locally diffused pheromone when the shortest path in use is blocked. Based on this local pheromone diffusion and rerouting behavior, we propose a new route maintenance protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. First, pheromones (i.e., routing information) are locally diffused around the shortest path between the source and the destination (i) by overhearing at the one-hop neighbors from the shortest path and (ii) by sharing the overheard pheromone information among the one-hop neighbors. Thereafter, a probabilistic path exploration is executed within the one-hop region based on the locally diffused pheromone and so useful alternative paths around the shortest path are discovered. Through intensive simulations, we verify that the proposed regional route maintenance protocol outperforms the conventional routing protocols in terms of disruption frequency, delivery ratio, delay, and jitter, while reducing the control overhead.