Hybrid Routing Scheme of Multi Agent Ant Based System in MANET

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are a kind of Wireless ad hoc networks. A mobile ad-hoc network is a self-configuring network connected by wireless links and they are a collection of mobile nodes which communicate over radio. The task of routing the packets from a source to the particular destination in ad-hoc networks is hard because the network elements are mobile and there is no central control over the network elements. Routing protocols determine the specific choice of route. There are various routing protocols available for MANETs. Broadly they are classified in to two, namely, Proactive or Table-Driven Routing techniques and Reactive or On-Demand Routing techniques. Ant colony optimization (ACO) depicts a proactive behavior, is a metaheuristic for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems inspired by the indirect communication of real ants. Multi Agent System (MAS) depicts a reactive behavior, is used to solve problems that are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or a monolithic system to solve. Hybrid Protocols try to profit the advantages of both reactive and proactive protocols and combine their basic properties into one.