Journal of Engineering Research and Reports

This study introduces the Secure Optimized Routing Algorithm (SORA) and its enhanced variant, ACO-SORA, that incorporates Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to address security vulnerabilities and inefficiencies in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). SORA achieved a 92% packet delivery fraction (PDF) and 20 ms end-to-end delay, outperforming AODV (85% PDF, 35 ms), ZRP (88% PDF, 28 ), and DSR (80% PDF, 40 ), while maintaining a 0.8 normalized routing load (NRL) versus AODV (1.2), ZRP (1.0), and DSR (1.5). Its bio-inspired extension, ACO-SORA, further reduced NRL by 15–20% (0.70 vs. SORA’s 0.85) and slashed route acquisition time by 50–60% (2  vs. SORA’s 5 ) through dynamic pheromone-guided path prioritization, ensuring sub-millisecond reconvergence during topology changes. ACO-SORA sustained linear throughput scalability up to 500 nodes (100 Mbps vs. SORA’s 90 Mbps) and reduced energy consumption by 12–15% through adaptive route maintenance, addressing legacy protocols’ limitations in scalability and congestion-induced latency. Both protocols demonstrated resilience against adversarial threats, with SORA mitigating 40–60% higher routing overhead in AODV/DSR and ACO-SORA enhancing robustness through heuristic-based stable path selection. By synergizing security-driven routing with bio-inspired optimization, ACO-SORA resolved critical gaps in prior trust-aware mechanisms, such as excessive control overhead and delayed rediscovery cycles, while ensuring 95% attack detection accuracy in high-mobility scenarios. These advancements situate SORA and ACO-SORA as transformative solutions for MANETs in adversarial, resource-constrained environments, offering a blueprint for hybrid protocols that balance efficiency, robustness, and adaptive resilience.