Abstract
Energy consumption always represents a challenge in the ad hoc networks which spurred the researchers to benefit from the bio-inspired algorithms and their fitness functions to evaluate nodes energy through the path discovery stage. In this paper we propose energy efficient routing protocol based on the well-known Ad Hoc On-Demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) routing protocol and a bio-inspired algorithm called Elephant Herding Optimization (EHO). In the proposed EHO-AOMDV the overall consumed energy of nodes is optimized by classifying nodes into two classes, while paths are discovered from the class of the fittest nodes with sufficient energy for transmission to reduce the probability of path failure and the increasing number of dead nodes through higher data loads. The EHO updating operator updates classes based on separating operator that evaluates nodes based on residual energy after each transmission round. Experiments were conducted using Ns-3 with five evaluation metrics routing overhead, packet delivery ratio, average energy consumption, end-to-end delay and number of dead nodes and four implemented protocols the proposed protocol, AOMDV and two bio-inspired protocols ACO-FDRPSO and FF-AOMDV. Results indicated that the proposed EHO-AOMDV attained higher packet delivery ratio with less routing overhead, average energy consumption and number of dead nodes over the state of art while in the end-to-end delay AOMDV has outperformed the proposed protocol.