ARA
ARA, the Ant-Colony-Based Routing Algorithm (Güneş, Sorges & Bouazizi, 2002),
as a standalone protocol: a simulator-agnostic core/ and the ns-3 contrib
module ara on
swarm-core. Status:
the org's Phase 3; the three slices of core/ (route discovery, route
maintenance by data, duplicate errors with route-failure backtracking) run in
ns-3 as the module ara (header codec, adapter, helper, example,
test.py -s ara, and the ara arm of ns3-tools' routing-compare). The
anchor (#5) misses: ARA's
routing load is below AODV's, its delivery is not above it, and the written
infeasibility verdict is docs/benchmarks/v0.2.0-anchor.md.
Release status: the first release, v0.1.0, comes before the comparator gates (maintainer decision 2026-11-10): it has not cleared them (org golden rule 6: fidelity sheet, per-PR delivery smoke, anchor). No number from v0.1.0 counts as a benchmark result. v0.2.0 (2026-11-13, Zenodo version DOI 10.5281/zenodo.24202635) is the release with the gates run: the anchor missed, and it ships with the written infeasibility verdict (docs/benchmarks/v0.2.0-anchor.md), so ARA's delivery against AODV is not presented as a reproduction of the paper. Releases are cut by release.yml and listed under Releases.
How to work here, for people and AI agents alike: AGENTS.md has
the rules and how to build and verify; the org conventions are in
CONTRIBUTING.md.
Releases & citing
Versions follow SemVer (CHANGELOG.md). Each release is listed under Releases, built by the org's release workflow and archived on Zenodo with its own DOI.
To cite this repository, use the “Cite this repository” button (from CITATION.cff):
| DOI | resolves to |
|---|
10.5281/zenodo.24125198 | concept DOI: always the latest release. This is the badge above, and the right citation when you mean this project. |
Each release also has its own version DOI, listed on its Zenodo record: cite that one when you reproduce a number measured at that release.
Please also cite the work it builds on:
- M. Gunes, U. Sorges, I. Bouazizi, ARA-the ant-colony based routing algorithm for MANETs, Proceedings. International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshop, pp. 79–85, 2002, doi:10.1109/icppw.2002.1039715. The algorithm this repository implements; docs/fidelity.md maps each of its sections to the code and marks the repository choices.
- D. H. Joppi, ns3-swarm-core, 2026, doi:10.5281/zenodo.24138628. The shared swarm-routing primitives core/ builds on (pinned by SWARM_CORE_REF) and the ns-3 glue the ara module derives from.
What this implementation reproduces from its sources, and every deliberate deviation, is in docs/fidelity.md.
Using it in your work? Contributions are welcome, and citing the DOI helps just as much.
Epics
What is planned and in progress here: the issues labelled epic. An epic's open sub-issues carry a priority:* and a model:* label, so a contributor or an AI agent can pick one up (how issues work). The whole org's plan: the roadmap.
| Epic | Status | Sub-issues closed |
|---|
| #3 ARA as a standalone hexagonal protocol (Phase 3) | In progress | 2 / 3 |
Licence
See LICENSING.md.
