Trusted and load-balanced ant-based routing in mobile ad hoc networks

This paper presents an ant-based trusted routing algorithm with load-balancing for mobile ad hoc networks within the framework of mobile process groups MPGs. The proposed algorithm uses a hybrid approach as it proactively forms the group views of mobile processes agents in initialisation phase and maintains and updates these group views reactively in accordance with the topology change in maintenance phase. Route is discovered reactively on-demand when a source node sends a route request for routing. Reactive path setup is instigated by sending ant packets on the trusted paths. These ant packets update the routing path with a pheromone value which is computed using trust on that node and the node's load taking capability. Therefore, ant packets always follow the path which is most trustworthy and has low traffic load density. The proposed approach was implemented in JADE and the results show that the nodes having high trust and less traffic load density were always chosen as forwarding nodes forming the trusted path with less load.