Abstract
As mobile ad hoc networks spread increasingly worldwide, an energy-efficient load-balancing routing protocol has become an urgent necessity, particularly considering the nodes' limited battery resources. Most proposed energy-efficient load-balancing routing protocols have encountered increasing delay because they have mainly considered energy at the expense of time and routing overhead. Cuckoo energy-efficient load-balancing on-demand multipath routing protocol is an alternate model of addressing routing challenges using meta-heuristics rather than heuristic-based routing schemes. Thus, we are proposing here a cuckoo search-inspired meta-heuristic-based attempt for an optimized load-balancing energy-efficient routing protocol. The proposed protocol employs the cuckoo search technique to designate an optimum routing path based on individual nodes' residual energy to balance the routing overhead among the individual nodes participating in routing. The new protocol has been evaluated and compared with the benchmarks of efficiencies achieved by energy-aware adaptations of on-demand Multipath Distance vector, packet count based routing mechanism, load balancing ad hoc on-demand multipath distance vector protocol, enhanced metric based ad-hoc on demand distance vector protocol, and Ant HocNet routing protocol. Upon analyzing the simulation-based results, the proposed routing scheme showed significant enhancements in packet delivery ratios, better battery life, and minimal packet delay time.