Proposal to enhance network routing by using ant colony optimization

Abstract EN

This research introduces a proposal to enhance routing in internetworking depending on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO).

The proposal concentrate on truth said : ACO itself is a met heuristic, so when combined with an actual problem area, it can lead to several heuristics.

From that, the two ACO algorithms Ant Colony System (ACS) and MAXMIN Ant System (MMAS) have been successfully applied to NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, like TSP (Travel Salesman Problem), are extended to be used for solving routing problems.

This research presented Ant Net, based on mobile agents, whose use is currently oriented towards packet switching wired networks, such as Internet, which inspired from ACO, implemented then obtained results are analyzed and critical parameters are determined and so several modifications of Ant Net were proposed, in what was called AntNet3 Ant Net3 improve an existing network routing technique in terms of speed of convergence when considering delay as the most important parameter for network convergence.

In general the proposed modification demonstrates a method by which delay and network overhead can be significantly reduced without a higher loss rate or jitter.

Experiments also indicate that the performance of the modified Ant Net, AntNet3, is significantly improved when paths are long or alternative paths are few.

Furthermore, under normal state of network operation, i.e.

when all nodes are actively engaged in sending / receiving information, the modified Ant Net significantly reduces the overall end to end delay.

With AntNet3 route optimization will not get stranded into local optima and always new and better paths are explored even if the network topologies get changed very frequently (i.e network interfaces attached to terminals or attached to different network may become up and down very frequently physically and consequently may change the topology of the network).

Hence problem of stagnation is solved.

Finally, the Proposal was implemented in Visual Basic (VB8) programming language.