Energy-Efficient and Stabilized Routing in Manets Using Golden Jackal Optimization

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) are distributed, self-organizing wireless systems that frequently suffer from resource depletion, network congestion, and unstable routing caused by highly dynamic node mobility. To overcome these, this paper proposed a novel routing stability framework based on Golden Jackal Optimization (GJO). It is stimulated by the cooperative hunting behaviour as well as exploration search of golden jackal. The GJO algorithm intelligently selects optimal forwarding paths to enhance overall network performance. Then by ensuring balanced energy consumption across nodes and minimizing route failures due to node collapse, the proposed GJO-based routing scheme significantly improves route lifetime and packet forwarding reliability. Generally results validate that the model consistently outperforms existing and metaheuristic routing protocols as throughput, end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, as well as energy consumption. Therefore, the proposed GJO-driven routing framework delivers a robust, scalable, and energy-aware solution for real-time MANET applications.