An enhanced distance and residual energy‐based congestion aware ant colony optimization routing for vehicular ad hoc networks

Summary Due to the ad hoc nature of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), routing in VANETs is challenging. Using an energy‐efficient shortest path without congestion (EESPWC) increases routing efficiency by satisfying specific parameters (high throughput, high packet delivery ratio, low overhead, low end‐to‐end delay, low packet loss ratio, and low energy consumption). In this work, enhanced distance and residual energy‐based congestion aware ant colony optimization (EDR‐CAACO) for VANETs is proposed to find an EESPWC. The proposed EESPWC produces high throughput and high packet delivery ratio with low overhead and low delay. In EDR‐CAACO, the roulette wheel selects the EESPWC based on the link's fitness values. The fitness value is computed based on the pheromone level of the link. The enhanced ACO (ant colony optimization) of the proposed model relies on the distance, residual, and congestion levels of the vehicles to estimate pheromone levels. For path selection, the roulette wheel relies on links that have the highest fitness value. The combination of high fitness value links provides an energy‐efficient non‐congested shortest route. The simulation results prove that the overall performance of EDR‐CAACO is better than Improved Distance Based Ant Colony Optimization Routing (IDBACOR), Fuzzy‐based Ant colony optimization (F‐ANT), ant colony optimization routing algorithm (ARA), and AntNet in terms of throughput, routing overhead, packet delivery ratio, end to end delay, and packet loss rate.