Abstract: Aimed at the problems of slow convergence speed, easy to fall into local optimum and high energy consumption of the network in the AODV routing protocol optimized by the basic ant colony algorithm, an AODV routing protocol method based on the improved ant colony algorithm is proposed. The method introduced node energy information and energy threshold into the state transfer probability formula and established a network energy-balanced routing mechanism to balance the energy consumption of network routing nodes and avoid node failure. The pheromone increment rule was improved by considering node energy, routing hops and distance comprehensively to increase the guidance for constructing routes and avoid falling into local optimum, thus speeding up the convergence of the algorithm. The pheromone concentration update method was optimized to enhance the guidance of short-circuit by to the ant colony to improve the algorithm search efficiency. Simulation results show that the algorithm has fast convergence speed, efficient search capability, good stability and low energy consumption.