Optimizing Energy Utilization in Ant Based Multipath Routing

Energy is an important resource in the field of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Limited energy at a particular node may lead to failure of a route in MANETs. The energy is consumed each and every time a node participates in transmission and forwarding of the packets. Controlling the number of packets to be forwarded through a particular node i.e. controlling participation of a node as an intermediate node may improve the overall energy state of the network. Ant colony Based Energy Efficient Routing Protocol (ACBEEMR) works on this principal and controls the number of packets to be forwarded through a particular node. For achieving this goal, it uses a threshold value known as energy factor. ACBEEMR utilizes the benefits of Ant Colony Optimization along with the feature of being an energy efficient protocol. In this paper, a modified variant of ACBEEMR i.e. MACBEEMR with some added functionalities has been introduced. This variant of ACBEEMR aims to increase the lifetime of the network. The Modified ACBEEMR (MACBEEMR) has also been compared with other multipath protocols.