DOI:10.21884/IJMTER.2020.7034.Q2EUL 64 AN ENERGY-EFFICIENT ROUTING ALGORITHM WITH ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION FRAMEWORK FOR MOBILE ADHOC NETWORKS: A PERORMANCE STUDY Bright Selorm K. Anibrika 1 Michael Asante 2 , Benjamin Hayfron-Acquah 3 , Ebenezer K. Gavua 4 1,4 Department of Computer Science, Koforidua Technical University, Koforidua, Ghana 2,3 Department of Computer Science, KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana Abstract─The main objective of this paper is increasing the routing capacity of the network. The proposed Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm which derived its fundamental framework from the AntNet routing algorithm (OMRA) was implemented with the aid of MANET simulation and a performance comparison was made between AODV and the new ACO algorithm using a network simulator. The proposed ant algorithm is very efficient in terms of performance over AODV under certain parameters such as throughput etc. Therefore, the following summary is the key findings from the experimentation of the proposed ant algorithm on one side and a comparison with AODV on the side. After the first phase of the simulation comparisons, it has been observed that, an increase in the nodal density caused an increment in the delay value of the mean End-to-End .Again, an increment in the pause time caused a decrease in the delay of the mean End-to-End value. The energy- efficient condition, C2(Condition 2), is able to perform very well (better) than the other energy-efficient conditions, basically, this is because, the selection the value for the energy condition was able to generate higher residual energy coupled with smaller number of dead nodes for EEOMRA and E-AODV. Nevertheless, the total number of connections established in the course of using E-AODV drops momentarily as compared to AODV. In contrast, it is realized that, with the number of established connections in EEOMRA. From this observation, it is rational also, to pronounce that, the energy-efficient condition C2 greatly improved the overall performance of AODV in relation to its energy-efficiency, thereby minimizing the network connectivity. The performance simulation of the proposed protocols was carried using NS2 25 version and Mathlab 2015 network simulators. In all, the results of simulation showed that the proposed protocol outperformed the proprietary as well as the modified protocol. Keywords─Ad-hoc Network, Simulation, ACO, Protocol, Algorithm, AntNet. I. INTRODUCTION Wireless routing algorithms most of the time are quite difficult to explain with mathematical models, therefore mostly explained wireless routing are done through simulation modelling. Early design of routing protocols actually focused mainly on unpredictable. Due to their infrastructureless nature routing in such an environment is unpredictable and unstable , for this reason MANETs is currently facing enormous challenges in terms of packet routing and best route determination and has called for several MANET routing algorithms to be