Impact of Ant Colony Optimization on Optimal Routing for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Using biologically inspired approaches has bonus advantages in offering optimal message distribution for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Bio-motivated approaches are motivated by the natural behavior of biological entities such as bees and insects. Ant colony optimization (ACO) is the optimal bio-inspired style, suitable for offering optimal routing in VANETs. The communication pattern of ACO and VANETs is similar, such as ants of ACO apply indirect communication among ants for the exchange of information, and VANETs require cooperative routing techniques for message exchange. The goal of the Bio-motivated approach is to attain proficient and accessible communication in a VANET, where vehicles turn as nodes and animatedly form a system to interchange information. In this context, the proposed work discusses the effectiveness and benefits of using a bio-inspired approach such as ACO for VANETs. To demonstrate ACO, a healthcare scenario is considered. In the healthcare system, efficient communication is required between emergency vehicles and hospitals to offer optimal treatment for patients. This work applies ACO to find the optimal path for sending an alarm to the nearest hospital from the emergency vehicle to arrange necessary things to treat patients. Using ACO increases the efficiency of the routing mechanism in all aspects such as throughput, overhead, data delivery, low latency, route discovery time, route repair time, convergence speed, and stagnation issue.