A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a group of wireless mobile nodes which form a temporary network without the need for any fixed infrastructure and centralized control. Since the nodes are mobile, path between the nodes may break at any moment of time. Thus, routing in such a network becomes really challenging. Ant colony optimization (ACO) problems are the subset of swarm intelligence optimization that uses the food searching behaviour of ants to solve the complex routing problem. ACO based routing protocols are efficient, scalable and are well adapted to the dynamic nature of MANET. This paper deals with study of characteristics and performance analysis of two ACO based routing algorithms namely, AntHocNet and Simple Ant Routing Algorithm (SARA). Two protocols are compared on their performances and their effectiveness is compared.
Ad-hoc network, MANET, Proactive, Reactive, Hybrid, ACO, AntHocNet, SARA, PDR, EED, throughput