An ant-assisted path-flow routing algorithm for telecommunication networks

For the integrated and QoS (quality of services) aware requests, a routing in the backbone network of the next generation telecommunication networks seems to be a path-flow based and centralized routing. In this paper we suggest a path-flow routing algorithm for the network that is assisted by ant colony behavior. In this algorithm ants monitor traffic of each path-flow in a given network, which can be changed dynamically. We use ants' pheromone to monitor and record the network status to avoid delay and packet loss of the traffic. We use the ants for this monitoring and reporting function of the network using stigmergy of the ant colony. A routing decision for the updated traffic is made by solving a mathematical programming formulation and an exact algorithm that was proposed in our previous work. We analyze the performance of our routing framework through simulation in various network instances. From this simulation we can conclude that our ant-assisted multi-commodity minimization algorithm shows some promising performance for the path-flow telecommunication networks.