468 | Page VOYAGING THROUGH VARIOUS ANT BASED ROUTING ALGORITHMS FOR MANETs Amanpreet Kaur 1 , V. S. Dhaka 2 , Gurpreet Singh 3 1 Research Scholar, 2 Professor, Department of Computer Science, Jaipur National University, Jaipur, (India) 3 Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Yamuna Institute of Engineering & Technology, Gadholi, Yamuna Nagar, (India) ABSTRACT Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consists of many wireless nodes or devices, placed together in an ad hoc manner and without the support of fixed infrastructure. All the nodes which are present in the network are mobile and can enter and leave the network any time. MANET serves the effective, operational bandwidth and have limited battery power for the nodes. Many different routing protocols and algorithms are used to conclude this challenging property.The swarm intelligence algorithms are:- Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Particle Swarm Optimization, Artifical immune systems, Artifical bee colony algorithms and many more. Ant Colony Optimization are more predicting in providing loop free, energy-aware, and multipath routing in mobile ad hoc networks. ACO routing algorithms use simple agents or artificial ants and these agents and ants demonstrate optimum paths between source and destination. These agents communicates indirectly with each other by means of stigmergy. This paper demonstrates a survey on different MANET routing protocols which are based on algorithm inspired by ACO. Keywords: Ant Conoly Optimisation, Mobile Adhoc Networks, Multi-path, Pheromone, Routing. I. INTRODUCTION MANET is a collection of autonomous mobile nodes and these nodes communicate with each other through radio waves. Mobile nodes those are in direct radio range can communicate with each other directly, but those who are not indirect range can communicate each other by using another node as an intermediate to intercommunicate. In a MANET environment, each node acts as a host and many times act as a router. Routing is one of the problems of networking for delivering data from one node to the any other node in the network. Wireless ad-hoc networks are also called Mobile ad-hoc multihop networks without predetermined topology or central control. This is because Mobile Ad-Hoc networks can be characterized as having a dynamic, multihop, potentially speedy changing topology. MANET uses a peer-to-peer multihop routing instead of a static network infrastructure to provide network connectivity. Due to the limited transmission range of wireless network interfaces, multiple hops may be needed to exchange data between nodes in the network. Due to frequent changes, in network topology and limited resources, routing in MANET experiences link fail many times but for short intervals. Link unbalance and node mobility make routing an essential issue in MANETs. Applications of