Abstract
Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) consist of special kind of wireless mobile nodes which form a temporary network without using any infrastructure or centralized administration. MANETs can be used in wide range of future applications as they have the capability to establish networks at anytime, anywhere without aid of any established infrastructure. It is a challenging task to find most efficient routing due to the changing topology and the dynamic behavior of the nodes in MANET. It has been found that ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms can give better results as they are having characterization of Swarm Intelligence (SI) which is highly suitable for finding the adaptive routing for such type of volatile network. ACO algorithms are inspired by a foraging behavior of group of ants which are able to find optimal path based upon some defined metric which is evaluated during the motion of ants. ACO routing algorithms use simple agents called artificial ants which establish optimum paths between source and destination that communicate indirectly with each other by means of stigmergy. Keeping in view of the above, in this paper we provide a taxonomy of various ant colony algorithms with advantages and disadvantages of each others with respect to various metrics. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.