Bionics

Bionics: from biology to technology

The Ant-Routing-Algorithm (ARA) is highly adaptive, efficient and scalable. It is based on swarm intelligence. ARA consists of three phases.

Route Discovery Phase: In this phase new routes are discovered in the network. The discovery of new routes requires the use of a forward ant (FANT) and a backward ant (BANT). A FANT is an agent which establishes the pheromone track back to the source node. Analogously, a BANT establishes the pheromone track back to its origin, namely the destination node.
Route Maintenance: This phase is responsible for the maintenance of the routes during the communication.
Failure Handling: This phase handles routing failures which are especially caused by node mobility.

We demonstrate the feasibility of ARA by implementing a distributed chat application over an ad-hoc network. Interested users are given a Pocket PC device and are asked to start the application and choose an appropriate name and nickname for chatting. The users are then allowed to move around and send chat messages to other users in the ad-hoc network. Our application was developed to run over Pocket PC devices, which have a (built-in or external) W-LAN 802.11b compatible interface. The devices should have support for point-to-point wireless communication, which is used to build an ad-hoc network. This is usually supported by all common W-LAN network interfaces.

Ad-hoc Networks

Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes which communicate over radio and do not need any pre installed communication infrastructure. Communication can be performed if two nodes are close enough to exchange packets.

Ant Routing Algorithm ARA

The routing is still the most challenging problem in mobile multi-hop ad-hoc networks which is aggravated by the node mobility. In the scope of our research engagements we introduced a new approach for routing in MANETS.
The Ant-Routing-Algorithm (ARA) is based on swarm intelligence and especially on ant algorithms. This fascinating class of algorithms try to map the solution capability of insect swarm to mathematical solutions.

Demo - MobiCom 2004

Screenshots

People

Publications

Mesut Günes, Martin Kähmer, and Imed Bouazizi: Ant-Routing-Algorithm (ARA) for Mobile Multi-hop Ad-hoc Networks - New Features and Results. In Proceedings of the 2nd Mediterranean Workshop on Ad-Hoc Net- works (Med-Hoc-Net'2003) , Mahdia, Tunesia, 25-27, June 2003.

Mesut Günes, Udo Sorges, and Imed Bouazizi: ARA - The Ant-Colony Based Routing Algorithm for MANETs .
In Stephan Olariu, editor, Proceedings of the 2002 ICPP Workshop on Ad Hoc Networks (IWAHN 2002) , pages 79-85. IEEE Computer Society Press, August 2002.

Acknowledgements

This project is supported by the "Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung".