Title: A secure transmission protocol using C-ACO routing selection in MANET

Authors: Sandeep Lalasaheb Dhende; Suresh Damodar Shirbahadurkar

Addresses: Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, ZES's Zeal College of Engineering and Research, Pune, Maharashtra, India ' Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, ZES's Zeal College of Engineering and Research, Pune, Maharashtra, India

Abstract: Developing extremely effective routing protocols for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) is a challenging task. Specifically, the existing methods faced difficulty in satisfying the Quality of Service (QoS) factors and lacked proper adaptation to the changes in network topology with minimal control overhead, making the routing in MANETs an NP-hard problem. Hence, the research proposes an energy-efficient Cuckoo-Ant Colony Optimisation (C-ACO) routing protocol to achieve efficient routing in MANET. The proposed approach demonstrates that the data transmission ought to choose the best path when the repetition of computation occurs within the network. In addition, the AES-128 standard encrypts the routing messages, and the network communication occurs using the QoS-aware C-ACO algorithm that enhances the routing. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm reached the end-to-end delay of 9 ms, Packet Delivery Rate of 95%, routing overhead of 0.020, and throughput of 4500 kbps on evaluating with blackhole attack.

Keywords: MANET; C-ACO; cuckoo-ant colony optimisation; security; QoS; quality-of-service; AES-128.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2026.150858

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2026 Vol.30 No.1, pp.61 - 76

Received: 27 Nov 2023
Accepted: 23 May 2024
Published online: 24 Dec 2025 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article