ANT-NET BASED AGENT ROUTING PROTOCOLS

IN WIRED NETWORKS.

Dissertation submitted to Periyar University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
award of the degree of

MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY
IN
COMPUTER SCIENCE

By

R. MEGALA
(Reg. No. M13CSC110)

Under the guidance of

S. SATHISH, M.C.A., M.Phil.

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

PERIYAR UNIVERSITY
SALEM – 636011

AUGUST-2014
 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that the dissertation entitled “Ant-Net Based Agent Routing
Protocols In Wired Networks" submitted to Periyar University, Salem in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the award of the degree of Master of Philosophy in Computer
Science is a record of the original research done by me under the supervision and guidance of
S. SATHISH, M.C.A., M.Phil. Associate Professor, Department of computer Science,
Periyar University, Salem – 636011 and that it has not formed the basis for the award of any
Degree / Diploma / Associate ship / Fellowship or similar title to any candidate of any
University.

Place: Salem Research Scholar

Date:
 CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the dissertation entitled “Ant-Net Based Agent Routing
Protocols In Wired Networks” submitted to Periyar University, Salem in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Master of Philosophy in
Computer Science is a record of the original research work done by Mrs. R. Megala
during the period of his study in the Department of Computer Science, Periyar
University, Salem under my supervision and guidance and the dissertation has not
formed the basis for the award of any Degree / Diploma / Associate ship / Fellowship
or similar title to any candidate of any University.

Place: Salem
Date:

Head of the Department Research Supervisor

Internal Examiner External Examiner

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Words cannot completely express the gratitude to those people who helped me a
lot in the completion of this dissertation.

I am very much grateful to my beloved PARENTS who helped me in all the ways and
molded me into what I am today. I thank the almighty for the blessings that have been
showered upon me to bring forth the success of this dissertation.

At the outset, I express my heartfelt thanks to our Honourable Vice-Chancellor

Prof. Dr. C. SWAMINATHAN, Ph.D., Periyar University, Salem, for having given
me a chance to do M.Phil in Computer Science.

First and foremost I would like to say sincere thanks to

Prof.Dr. K. THANGAVEL, M.Sc., M.Phil., Ph.D., M.C.A.,Head, Department of
Computer Science, for having provided me all the facilities, masterly guidance and
support in completing my dissertation work successfully.

I express my heartfelt thanks to my guide S. SATHISH M.C.A., M.Phil.

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, for his masterly guidance,
valuable and timely suggestion, kind co-operation, encouragement and support in
completing our dissertation work. Without his support and guidance the
accomplishment of this dissertation would have been unrealizable.

My heart goes all in gratitude to my husband, all my friends and authorities who

encouraged and helped me in numerous ways.

R.MEGALA
 CONTENTS

CHAPTER TITLE PAGE NO

NO

ABSTRACT

1 INTRODUCTION 1

2 ANT-AGENT 11

3 20

4 RELATED WORK 23

5 24

6 SIMULATION RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 38

7 CONCLUSION 47

REFERENCES 48
 ABSTRACT

There are neither fixed routers nor fixed locations for the routers as in cellular
networks - also known as infrastructure networks (Fig. 1). Cellular networks consist of a
wired backbone which connects the base-stations. The mobile nodes can only communicate
over a one-hop wireless link to the base-station; multi-hop wireless links are not possible. By
contrast, a MANET has no permanent infrastructure at all.

Figure1.1 Infrastructure Network

 Infrastructure network consists of a network with fixed and wired gateways. A
mobile host communicates with a bridge in the network (called base station) within its
communication radius. The mobile unit can move geographically while it is communicating.
When it goes out of range of one base station, it connects with new base station and starts
communicating through it.

Wired based routing protocol in infrastructure network that comprises wired

mobile nodes able to communicate each other outside base station range. Due to movement
within the range. In this paper we present a novel routing devoted for wired networks. In
entails both reactive and proactive components. More precisely, the algorithm is based on ant
general behavior, but differs from the classic ant methods inspired from Ant-colony-
Optimization algorithm [1]. We do not use during the reactive route phase, a broadcast
technique that exponentially increase the route discovery technique that considerably reduces
the communication overhead. In the simulation result, we show that our protocol can
outperform both (Destination Sequenced Distance-Vector) protocol [2], one of the most
important current state-art-algorithms, in terms of end-to-end-delay, packet delivery ratio and
the communiqué overhead.
 CHAPTER -1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Overview

In Ant-agent wired networks [3], wired nodes cooperate with each other to
from a network with a fixed infrastructure such as access point or base stations in which nodes
perform routing discovery and routing safeguarding in a self-organized way.

The Ant-Agent is periodically created by each node and thus the number of
agents in the network can continually be controlled. However, when a connection is deliberate
to be established by a node with another one within the lack of a route in its routing table, the
measured node makes a route request by setting a local variable available for Ant-agent
passing done it. A first mobile agent, called Ant-Agent, is dependable of establishing routes.
A second mobile agent, called Rectifier-Ant, is issued by a node whenever a change in the
network topology is detected. Our protocol is a whole multi-agent based system our typical
remains based on the ant behavior.
A quantity of ant-based routing algorithms occurs either in wired [4] or in
wireless [5-9] networks. These days, the focus of research is being set on new technologies
and routing protocols, which no longer need base stations, fixed routers, or any other
infrastructure. The main idea of our protocol is to build a multi agent based system where each
node provides several kinds of agents. Regarding the purposes of the routing task, we design
two main types of agents. A first mobile agent, called Ant-Agent, is responsible of
establishing routes. A second mobile agent, called Rectifier-Ant, is issued by a node whenever
a change in the network topology is detected. Our protocol is a complete multi-agent based
system, where an agent works independently from the others. This fits very well spontaneous
networks such as wired ad-hoc networks, because of the very high mobility and self-
organization properties of this type of networks. Our protocol inherits from the advantages of
this kind of model: autonomous work, distributed intelligence and robustness. Furthermore,
the use of mobile agents allows to easily extending the functionalities of a protocol by simply
adding other agents or by assigning other functionalities to existing ones.

1.2 ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION (ACO) BASED ROUTING ALGORITHMS

The Ant Colony Optimization due its nature can be applied to the routing of
MANETs. As the MANETs routing can be classified into Proactive, Reactive and Hybrid
categories, similarly ACO applications over MANETs can also be categorized into similar
categories.

1.3 CLASSIFICATION

Figure1.2 Classification of ACO Routing Protocol in MANET

 1.3.1 TABLE-DRIVEN ROUTING PROTOCOLS (Proactive)

Table-driven protocols are also called as proactive protocols since they maintain
the routing information even before it is needed. Each and every node in the network
maintains routing information to every other node in the network. Routes information is
generally kept in the routing tables and is periodically updated as the network topology
changes. Many of these routing protocols come from the link-state routing. There exist some
differences between the protocols that come under this category depending on the routing
information being updated in each routing table.

Furthermore, these routing protocols maintain different number of tables. The

proactive protocols are not suitable for larger networks, as they need to maintain node
entries for each and every node in the routing table of every node. This causes more
overhead in the routing table leading to consumption of more bandwidth. Some of the
examples for proactive routing protocols is DSDV.

DISTINATION SEQUENCED DISTANCE VECTOR ROUTING (Dsdv)

The Destination Sequenced Distance Vector Protocol (DSDV) [5] is a proactive,

distance vector protocol which uses the Bellman-Ford algorithm. Compared to RIP one more
attribute is added to then routing table. The sequence number as new attribute guarantees
loop-freedom. It makes it possible for the mobile to distinguish stale routes from new ones
and that is how it prevents loops. DSDV can only handle bidirectional links.

ROUTING TABLE MANAGEMENT

The routing table in each node consists of a list of all available nodes, their
metric, the next hop to destination and a sequence number generated by the destination node.
The routing table is used to transmit packets through the ad hoc network. In order to keep the
routing table consistent with the dynamically changing topology of an ad hoc network the
nodes have to update the routing table periodically or when there is a significant change in
the network. Therefore mobile nodes advertise their routing information by broadcasting a
routing table update packet. The metric of an update packet starts with metric one for one-hop
neighbors and is incremented by each forwarding node and additionally the original node tags
the update packet with a sequence number. The receiving nodes update their routing tables if
the sequence number of the update is greater than the current one or it is equal and the metric
is smaller than the current metric. Delaying the advertisement of routes until best routes have
been found may minimize fluctuations of the routing table. On the other hand the spreading
of the routing information has to be frequent and quick enough to guarantee the consistency
of the routing tables in a dynamic network. There exist two types of update packets. One is
the full dump which contains the entire routing table and must be periodically exchanged.
The other is an incremental update which only consists of the information changed since the
last full dump.

RESPONDING TO TOPOLOGY CHANGES

DSDV responds to broken links by invalidating all routes that contain this
link. The routes are immediately assigned an infinite metric and an incremented sequence
number. Broken links can be detected by link and physical layer components or if a node
receives no broadcast packets from its next neighbors for a while. Then the detecting node
broadcasts immediately an update packet and informs the other nodes with it. If the link to a
node is up again, the routes will be re-established when the node broadcasts its routing table.

ANT-NET ALGORITHM

DiCaro and Dorigo introduced an adaptive routing algorithm based on the

adaptive learning and ant colonies called Ant Net, for routing in packet-switching networks
[DiCaro and Dorigo, 1997]. This algorithm explores the network with the goal of building
(and rebuilding) routing tables and keeping them adapted to traffic conditions. It is presented
as a distributed, scalable and responsive algorithm for routing in wired networks. The
algorithm is improved upon in [Barán and Sosa, 2000].
In the Ant Net algorithm, routing is determined by means of very complex interactions of
forward and backward network exploration agents “ants”. The idea behind this sub-division
of agents is to allow the backward ants to utilize the useful information gathered by the
forward ants on their trip from source to destination. Based on this principle, no node routing
updates are performed by the forward ants. Their only purpose in life is to report network
delay conditions to the backward ants, in the form of trip times between each network node.
The backward ants inherit this raw data and use it to update the routing table of each node.
The entries of the routing table are probabilities, where the sum of each row in this table must
equal 1. These probabilities serve a dual purpose:

1. The exploration agents of the network use them to decide the next hop to a
destination, randomly selecting among all candidates based on the routing table probabilities
for a specific destination.

2. The data packets deterministically select the path with the highest probability for
the next hop. The sequence of actions in Ant Net is simple and intuitive:

 Each network node launches forward ants to all destinations in regular time
intervals.

 The ant finds a path to the destination randomly based on the current routing
tables.

 The forward ant creates a stack, pushing in trip times for every node as that
node is reached.

 When the destination is reached, the backward ant inherits the stack.

 The backward ant pops the stack entries and follows the path in reverse.

 The routing tables of each visited node are updated based on the trip times.
UPDATING ROUTING TABLES

The update of the routing table is done by using the quantity, r', which derived
according to:

Where T is the trip time from the current node to the destination, μ is average of T, and C is
a scaling factor, usually set to 2.Except for the routing table, each node also possesses a table
with records of the mean and variance of the trip time to every destination. The ratio of the
variance to the mean (σ /μ) is used as a measure of the consistency of the trip times, and
accordingly, it alters the effect of the trip time on the routing table. Based on the value of r',
we determine the relative goodness of the trip time of an ant. Corresponding strategies of
either decreasing or increasing the value of r' by a certain amount are then followed, based on
setting the threshold for the good/bad trip time to 0.5, and selecting a threshold for the (σ /μ)
ratio (see Table 1).

Table 1. Ant Net processing cases

 The principle of these updates is that small values of r' correspond to small
values of T and vice versa. By testing, the case in which the consistency is high and the time
is good, the algorithm requires the processed value r' to be even smaller. Therefore, an
exponential quantity is subtracted. This quantity is the exponentially decaying function of the
consistency ratio, and it achieves its highest value when the variance is very small. The decay
rate can be controlled through parameters a' and a.

Further, positive or negative reinforcement of good or bad routes takes place

next, via positive and negative feedback. Any positive reinforcement of probability should be
negatively proportional to current probabilities, and any negative one should be proportional
to current probabilities. The effect of this is to prevent saturation of the routing table
probabilities to be 0 or 1. The node that receives the positive reinforcement is the one from
which the backward ant comes. This is the same node chosen by the forward ant as next-hop
on the way to its destination. All the other neighbors of the current node need to be negatively
reinforced to preserve the unit sum of all the next-hop probabilities. The reinforcement
equations are:

Where Pdf, Pdn are the previous routing table probabilities, f is the node from
which the backward ant comes, Nk is the neighbor of node k (current node), and d is the
destination node. The last step is to update the routing table probabilities using the following
rules
 The packets of the network then use these probabilities in a deterministic way,
choosing as next hop the one with the highest probability. The behavior of the Ant Net
algorithm can be more easily understood with an example, therefore, we will discuss in detail
an example for this algorithm.

ANT-AODV (Hybrid)

Shivanajay, tham and srinivasan [150] propose a proactive-reactive

hybrid protocol which combine element from Ant Net and the AODV routing protocol. The
Ant-AODV routing protocol maintains a population of forward ants which explore the
network with a source-routing list of visited nodes in the packet’s header. Additionally, when
a node requires a route specific node it may reactively launch RREQ packet, though it is not a
clear whether the launched RREQ packets use source or distance-vector routing. The protocol
also uses frequent hello messages which allow node to be continuously aware of the
neighbours, and alerts nodes of link failures. Nodes maintain distance-vector routing tables
with destination/next-hop pairs and associated hop count and the sequence numbers for each
route.

The protocol is compared to the AODV protocol and the results in the terms of end-
to-end delay, packet delivery fraction, and normalised routing overhead and node
connectivity. Simulation performed by Shivanajay. Tham and Srinivasan indicate that the
end-to-end delay and packet delivery fraction of Ant-AODV is comparable to AODV, with
Ant-AODV having slightly higher normalised routing overhead due to the continuous
proactive movement of forward ants.
 CHAPTER -2
LITERATURE REVIEW:

This section explores some of the researches done on Routing in MANET using
Ant Colony Optimization by various researchers in previous years.
In 2013, Aws Kanan et al. [8] applied the Ant Colony evolutionary optimization technique to
the routing problem, where more of those desirable properties can be implied in the guided
probabilistic choice of paths. Simulations of a routing based on the biological system referred
to as Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) were conducted, taking into account several factors to
analyze its adaptive nature. Scenarios with high degrees of node mobility showed that the
performance of the algorithm in terms of average end-to-end delay and success rate was not
degraded.