Abstract: Security, efficiency and reliability remains to be the major requirements of a MANET. However, there exists tradeoffs in each of the requirements and not all the three can be achieved to its maximum extent. This paper uses the three-opt variant of ACO with high emphasis towards exploration. The three-opt variant operates by identifying the shortest path after every ant in the system has identified a complete path. Simulated Annealing (SA) is used to identify the best path from these available set of paths. The major concentration of this approach is to obtain an equilibrium point for best efficiency and time. Experiments were conducted using several datasets and the efficiency and randomness observed in the obtained paths revealed that the algorithm performs effectively.

Keywords: MANET, Routing, ACO, Multipath Routing, Simulated Annealing.