In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), nodes are mobile and have limited energy resource that can quickly deplete due to multi-hop routing activities, which may gradually lead to an un-operational network. In the past decade, the hunt for a reliable and energy-efficient MANETs routing protocol has been extensively researched. This paper proposes a novel Ant Net-based routing scheme for MANETs (so-called MAnt Net), and an its enhanced energy-aware version (so-called E-MAnt Net), for which the routing decisions are facilitated based on the nodes’ residual energy.
These protocols were evaluated through simulations using NS2, showing that E-MAnt Net outperforms both MAnt Net and EAODV, in terms of network residual energy, network lifetime, number of established connections, and the number of dead nodes in the network, where E-AODV is an energy-aware version of AODV.