A Survey on Energy Awareness Mechanisms in ACO-Based Routing Protocols for MANETs

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is slowly emerging to be one of the most innovative and challenging areas of wireless networking due to its increasing demand in various areas of application including wireless sensor network (WSN), military application, disaster relief, collaborative and distributed computing, and health and business. Still, the energy-constrained nature of the wireless mobile nodes imposes many restrictions during the design and implementation of MANET routing protocols. This paper focuses on the energy awareness issue during routing protocol design in MANET. Several energy-aware routing protocols have been proposed in past and, out of them, we have considered energy-aware Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) routing protocols for MANET for a comprehensive review. From this paper, researchers can get a brief idea about the functionality of energy-aware routing protocols, mainly using ACO algorithm and use that to propose new mechanisms to handle the energy awareness issue in a MANET.