Synergy Between MANET And Biological Swarm
Systems
Arunabh Mishra
Sikkim Manipal Institute Of Technology,Sikkim Manipal University,Rangpo,Sikkim -737132
Abstract-A whole new school of thought rooted in
evolutionary biology are emerging to rattle the narrow
assumptions of scientific age and seek to decipher the real
lessons from living systems. This paper provides insight
into the working of biological swarm systems. It attempts
to extend the swarm intelligence approach to solve routing
and control problems in telecommunications.
Initial work in the field of swarm intelligence has shown
a similarity between routing requirements of a wireless
communication system and these biological swarm
systems.
The main issue of a wireless network is:
(a) Network topology (b) Quality Of Service(QoS)
(c) Power Requirements
Thus network routing and control becomes the
important factor determining the efficiency of any
network, which has different heterogeneous nodes having
different data rates and protocols.
In this paper we focus on network routing problem and
employ swarm intelligent approaches for its efficient
solution. The primary aim of this adaptive swarm
intelligent routing is to provide network routing through
heterogeneous nodes in a manner that will provide the
path with minimum error rates and fastest hop. Thus
providing the efficient Quality Of Service.
I. INTRODUCTION
1) Swarm Intelligence
Swarm Intelligence is a property of systems of unintelligent
agents of limited individual capabilities exhibiting collectively
intelligent behavior. An agent in this definition represents an
entity capable of sensing its environment and undertaking
simple processing of environmental observations in order to
perform an action chosen from those available to it
Fig 1 : Food Foraging by ants – a swarm system
. These actions include modification of the environment in
which the agent operates. Intelligent behavior frequently arises
through indirect communication between the agents, this being
the principle of stigmergy. It should be stressed, however, that
the individual agents have no explicit problem solving
knowledge and intelligent behavior arises as a result of the
actions of societies of such agents[1]
2)Example I (ant colony)
A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The
study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help
humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to
military robots. One key to an ant colony, for example, is that
no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No
managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to
lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just
fine with no management at all—at least none that we would
recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions
between individual ants, each of which is following simple
rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-
organizing.[2]
3)Example II(Bee Hive)
In bee hives is a strong hierarchial entreprise model exists
with drones,workers and Queen bee. Take for example a
relocation of hive, which exhibits the democratic and
autocratic hierarchy in bees. The scout bees come to a decision
by an intelligent voting mechanism, and the site that reaches
the majority votes in minimum time gets selected.[3]
The same analogy can be applied to routing system in
wireless communication systems,whereby a next node to be
hopped can be determined by ―bit-ants‖, a node will be
determined using defined detrimental factors and once the
optimum number has been reached the node gets selected.
Craig Reynolds a computer animator designed a C++
program that simulated the flocking behaviour of birds.He
gave simple algorithmic instructions to boid
(1) avoid clustering (separation)
(2) Fly in an average directioin of boids (alignment)
(3) Follow the adjacent boid.(cohesion)
Thus he was able to simulate a self organizing model of
schooling and flocking that was actually a swarm
behaviour.[4] Similarly an france based company Air Liquide
developed a computer based model for their transport routing
inspired by foraging behaviour of ants (Linepithema humile),
a species that deposits chemical substances called
pheromones. When a ants go for a foraging they leave a trail
through chemical substances called pheromones, and the
following foragers follow the route having strongest
pheromones trail.[5] Similarly the algorithm sends the
virtual ants over the road maps and updates the data system for
the trails, thus the delivery trucks waiting in the queue follow
the path given by the computer system.
II. MOBILE AD HOC NETWORK (MANET)
The notion of ad-hoc networking refers to the spontaneous
formation of a network of computing nodes without reliance
on a specific infrastructure. Typical ad-hoc networks consist
of mobile nodes—ranging from laptops and pocket PCs to
miniature sensor devices— with widely different computation
and communication capabilities. Node mobility may be
limited to deployment, as in the case of some sensor networks,
or may continue throughout the lifetime of the network, as is
the case in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Ad-hoc
networks may also be formed by application-level software
agents executing on top of a fixed communication
infrastructure. In such networks, node mobility can take the
guise of software-agent migration among different hosts, or
even of autonomous peers (e.g., principals, domains) joining
or leaving peer-to-peer (P2P) networks formed without the
benefit of a separate, fixed collaboration infrastructure[6]
A Mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET) is a collection of
wireless mobile nodes, which dynamically form a temporary
network, without using any existing network infrastructure or
centralized administration. They are sometimes called
infrastructureless networking since the mobile nodes in the
network dynamically establish routing paths between
themselvesCurrent typical applications of a MANET include
battlefield coordination and onsite disaster relief
management.
The emergence of the Mobile Ad Hoc Networking (MANET)
technology advocates self-organized wireless interconnection
of communication devices that would either extend or operate
in concert with the wired networking infrastructure or,
possibly, evolve to autonomous networks. In particular, in
MANET, any node may compromise the routing protocol
functionality by disrupting the route discovery process.
III. EXISTING ROUTING PROTOCOLS
A large amount of works already exist on network routing. But
the wireless network routing present its very specific problems
due to its dynamic nature.
The node movements, radio interference, addition of new
nodes. Lot of work is being done on swarm intelligent routing
and the best of routing schemes depend on channel
characteristics.
The two popular dynamic routing approaches in wired
networks are Distance Vector Routing and Link state
routing[7]The distance state routing based on Bellman-ford
routing algorithm.In it every router maintains a routing table
where distance information to all reachable hosts is stored.
The distance is calculated on based on metrics such as hop
number, queue length or delay.[8]
In Link state routing algorithm each node periodically
notifies its current status to all routers. In it the metrics chosen
are number of hops, link speed and traffic congestion. In wired
networks both the algorithms perform well because of the
predictable network properties. Open Shortest Path
First(OSPF) is an example of link state routing.[9] But in
mobile ad- hoc networks their dynamic property deteriorates
their effectiveness. Thus the frequently changing topology
increases the control overhead thus causing scarce bandwidth
Thus there are three different ways to evaluate and compare
performance of mobile ad hoc routing protocols:
(1) Based on analysis[10]
(2) Based on simulation results in Network Simulator,
OPNET
(3) By analyizing data from real world.
Wireless Routing Protocol In WRP- a table driven or
proactive routing protocol, guarantees loops freedoms and
avoids temporary routing loops. But since it maintains a four
routing tables hence uses a significant memory and
bandwidth.[13] Optimized Link State Routing(OLSR) It is
also a proactive routing approach. Each node propagates its
link state information to all other nodes in the network, using
periodical beacons.[14]
Ad hoc ON Demand Distance Vector Routing(AODV) It uses
periodic beaconing and sequence numbering procedure of
DSDV [15] algorithm. It has potentially less routing overheads
as destination carry only destination address and not the whole
routing information (as in DSR).
IV. SYNERGY BETWEEN COMMUNICATION
NETWORK AND BIOLOGICAL SWARM-AN OVERVIEW
OF SWARM BASED ROUTING
Initial work in swarm intelligence has revealed a great deal of
synergy between the routing requirements of communication
networks and certain tasks that exist in biological swarms. For
instance, a key characteristic of swarm intelligence is the
ability of agents (ants) to find optimal (or near optimal)
routing (in food gathering operations for example), where
intelligent behavior arises through indirect communications
between the agents, a phenomenon known as stigmergy.
• Dynamic ―online‖ optimization using local information
• No exchange of global information for routing determination
• Inherent scalable nature, resulting in graceful builds and
degradations
• Characteristics leading to robustness (fault-tolerance) under
most contingencies
Fig 2. Collective ant motion based on pheromones level
Swarm-intelligent routing methods will enhance the
reliability and timeliness of data transfer within a
heterogeneous multi-node wireless communication network.
They will furthermore reduce the overhead in network growth
due to their inherently scalable features
 A swarm can be seen as a set of non- zero communicating
and distributed autonomous agents each engaged in one or
more tasks, and with no or little centralized control.
Interactions among constituents of swarm results a process of
self organization that gives rise to interesting/useful behaviors
at the system level, such a phenomenon is called as swarm
Intelligence
1) Swarm Routing
Historically, the routing algorithms used in communication
networks have evolved from static routing in which \good
routes" are computed off-line to more dynamic routing in
which the routes are computed online to take the node
congestion level into account.In the present paper emphasis
has been laid upon forward routing only.[16]
Routing systems frequently depend upon global information
for their efficient operation.
Ant systems do not need such global information,
relying instead upon pheromone traces that are laid
down in the network as the ant, or agent, moves
through the network.
Global information is frequently out of date and
transmission of the information required from one
node to all others consumes considerable network
bandwidth.
V. PROBLEM CHARACTERISTICS AND
COMMUNICATION NETWORK MODEL
Routing algorithms have the goal of directing traffic from
sources to destinations maximizing some measure of network
performance. Often throughput (proportional to Bit Error
Rate) and packet delay (sec-proportional to transit time) are
the performance measures taken into account. Throughput
measures the quantity of service that the network has been
able to offer in a certain amount of time, while packet delay
defines the quality of service produced.Routing decisions can
only be made on the basis of local andapproximate
information about the current and the future network states,
with additional constraints posed by the network switching
and transmission technology. For this purpose, every routing
node holds a buffer space where the incoming and the
outgoing packets are stored.
This buffer is responsible for maintain the dynamic
routing table which is actually analogous to pheromone level
in biological systems, and is shared resource among all the
queues attached to every incoming and outgoing link of the
node. All the traveling packets are subdivided in two classes:
data and routing packets. All the packets in the same class
have the same priority, so they are queued and served only on
the basis of a first-in-first-out policy, but routing packets have
a higher priority than data packets.
Data packets are fed into the network by applications (i.e.,
processes sending data packets from origin nodes to
destination nodes) whose arrival rate is dictated by a selected
probabilistic model. The number of packets to send, their sizes
and the intervals between them are assigned according to
some defined process. A simple flow control mechanism is
implemented which determines the maximum number of data
packets waiting to be sent. Once sent a packet is considered to
be acknowledged. The time it takes to a packet to move from
one node to a neighboring one depends on its size and on the
link transmission characteristics. If on packet's arrival there is
not enough buffer space to hold it, the packet is discarded.
Packets are also discarded because of expired time to live.
After transmission, the routing table is updated to be used by
next arriving bit-ants.
1) Routing Benchmarks (standard performance metrics)
a) Bit Error Rate (BER)
b) Transit Time (Packet Delay) (sec)
The BER measures the Quantity of service that the network
delivers over a specified time interval. Transit Time gives the
QoS of the network
We have two packets (ROUTING AGENTS)
1. routing packet (more priority)
2. data packet
At regular interval every network nodes emits packets with
randomly selected destination. All packets select their next
hop proportional to information stored in routing table ie
probabilities of selecting a link.
In this algorithm the routing will be determined by through
complex interactions of network exploration agents called
BIT-ANTS….
Step-1-----the nodes launches BIT-ANTS to all
destinations at regular time interval.
Step-2-----BIT-ANTS find a route to the destination based
on routing tables.
Step-3-----In the process they update the routing table.
A packet may discarded at a node due to
(a)expired time-to-live(TTL) (b) lack of buffer space
A typical routing table:
PREVIOUS TRANSIT BER(Hσ)
NODE TIME(Ht)
A
D
TX B
RX
E
C
Fig 3. A typical network with 5 nodes.
Each nodes inserts two header Ht and Hσ.
Ht corresponds to transit time
Hσ corresponds to Bit Error Rate
The ―BIT-ANTS” are sent in the very beginning of the
transmission from receiver to transmitter. The bit ants are
responsible for the initial filling up of the routing tables.
Subsequently the data packets are transmitted across the
network.
We define a new quantity, y which is product of Ht and Hσ VII. LIMITATIONS
y= Ht * Hσ The proposed swarm intelligent routing approach to solve
So when a data packet reaches a particular node it observes the routing and control problems in an Ad hoc system does not
routing table for that node. Looks for the minimum value of y takes following factors in consideration:
(=Ht * Hσ) and hops to the next node. The data packet 1) The flexibility of the protocol with the other existing
simultaneously updates the routing table for the new value of protocols.
Ht and Hσ. Similarly this part is repeated for other subsequent 2) The relevant changes will have to be made for
nodes. implementation on wired and wireless system.
Thus the routing table gets dynamically updated while a data 3) The security concerns.
packet traverses from transmitter to receiver, hopping from
one node to other. VIII. CONCLUSION
In this paper the author has described a novel application
HT Hσ DATA of intelligent swarm system. Current existing routing
protocols have been studied and a new protocol based on
biological swarms has been proposed.
ROUTING TABLE FOR NODE
PREVIOUS BIT ERROR PACKET The application presented here is unique, the
NODE RATE DELAY (Hσ) implementation of routing protocols based for MANET . The
(Ht) approach being dynamic in nature can be extended to both
B point to point communication and point to multipoint
C communication systems. The implementation of this model in
D MATLAB has been proposed whereby the simulated models
for routing will have to be implemented. Also the author is
PATH CALCULATION (for >=1 RX and >=1 TX) looking for if the work can be extended to wireless mesh
INTERMEDIATE NODES IN POSSIBLE networks. (IEEE 802.11s)
NODES PATH PATHS
IX. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I would like to extend my acknowledgement to my Head
1 1 1 Of Department, (Dr) Mr. R. N. Bera who provided me
with invaluable relevant assistance with this work.
2 2 2
3 1 3
2 6
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FIG 2.Three intermediate nodes [12] Http/www.opnet.com
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B

FIG 3.Two intermediate node