Ant-based Routing

The Ant Routing Algorithm (ARA) is a reactive routing protocol that is inspired by the collective behavior of ants. Packets leave pheromone trails in the network during the route discovery. Subsequent packets prefer to follow trails with a high pheromone count. This principle is different from the route discovery applied by DSR, AODV, and other protocols as it has a fully implicit and overhead-free route maintenance.

des-ara is our implementation based on the DES-SERT routing framework. By using the provided CLI commands of the routing daemon several variants can be configured that have a significant different behavior. While the daemon already enables routing in the testbed, we lack data for evaluation and comparison with other protocols. Some remaining problems have to be solved and modification made to optimize the performance.

Objectives

• Get familar with the ARA protocol and its implementation based on DES-SERT
• Run inital experiments in the testbed and measure throughput, delay, packet reordering, etc
• Improve the ARA implementation, e.g., by replacing the flooding of route discovery packets (forward ANTs [FANTs]) by gossip routing
• Optimize the timing parameters to decrease the number of alternative routes while at the same time ensuring that there is always a minimum number left
• Specify and run a large experiment series in the DES-Testbed