Abstract: Incorporating energy awareness in identifying the routes in MANET is one of the mandatory mechanisms to be incorporated in any routing protocol. This helps reduce selfishness in node and hence prolongs the network’s lifetime. This paper presents a metaheuristic based routing scheme for MANET that identifies next hop nodes not only based on their distance, but also on the residue charge left in them. This approach uses a modified Ant Colony Optimization technique with threshold limits for exploration and exploitation levels. These limits are set such that the exploration is given more importance, in-order to maintain the randomness and avoid repetitive usage of the same node. Experiments reveal that this approach exhibits low computational complexity and provides sufficient randomness for the node selection mechanism.

Keywords: MANET; Routing; ACO; CDF; Energy efficiency; Altruism; Selfishness.