# Energy-Balanced Routing Algorithm Based on Ant Colony Optimization for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
## 4 Simulations
### Performance of Routing Protocol
Figure 7 shows the relationship between the number of dead nodes and node moving speeds. It can be seen that the number of deaths of the node increases as the moving speed of the node increases. This is because the data retransmission and the number of route discovery times increase, so that the energy consumption of the node increases. Compared to IEMACO, the number of dead nodes in AOMDV increases significantly due to measuring the link quality by distance. On the contrary, IEMACO selects the path with better link quality according to the residual energy, energy consumption rate and node speed, so that it can adapt to network topology changes and balance energy consumption. Therefore, the number of dead nodes is not significantly affected by the speed of the node. In summary, as IEMACO introduces the remaining life time of the link in routing by considering the node speed direction and the node distance, it can avoid selecting the path that is easy to break,  
Figure 6: First node death time versus node moving speed. Figure 7: Number of dead nodes versus node moving speed. reduce the route discovery frequency and increase the first node death time. Therefore, the average end-to-end delay of the network is reduced, the packet delivery rate is improved, and the performance of the network is improved as a whole. **Performance comparison with different network load**. Figure 8 shows the average end-to-end delay at different node packet rates. It can be seen that, as the node packet rate increases, the average end-to-end delay increases in varying degrees. For AOMDV, the data is transmitted through the main path while the processing capacity of each node is limited, once the packet transmission rate increases, the cache queue of the node increases. For this reason, the end-to-end delay of AOMDV grows fast. AntHocMMP and IEMACO route through multipath, the load increase is spread over different paths, so the delay increases slowly. IEMACO achieves the lowest end-to-end delay because the last hop node performs route discovery when the next hop node is unreachable when the link fails, which can significantly reduce the end-to-end delay. Since the probability of a route to be selected is calculated based on the sum of pheromone in the literature [21], the operation becomes simple, but the convergence speed is slow. In addition, because the energy metric takes into account the values of processing, transmission and reception, the curve changes less. Figure 9 shows the change in packet delivery rate at different node packet rates. As the packet sending rate increases, the packet delivery rate decreases in varying degrees. The reason is that, as the network load increases, the node is limited by the processing capability, causing network congestion, so the packet loss rate increases, and the packet delivery rate decreases. Compared with the other two routing protocols, the performance of IEMACO proposed in this paper is obviously improved. IEMACO combines the speed and the distance of the node to actively avoid selecting the nodes with higher speed. In addition, by calculating the energy consumption rate of the nodes, the load of the network is dispersed to different paths, and the nodes with longer remaining lifetime tend to be more possible to be selected. LNNACO does not consider the impact of node movement, so it will cause packet loss due to link breakage caused by node movement. Similarly, because the energy metric takes into account the values of processing, transmission and reception, the curve changes less. Figure 8: Average end-to-end delay versus node packet rate. Figure 10 compares the first node death time at different node packet rates. It can be seen from the figure that the first node dead time of the node decreases as the packet sending rate increases.