New Variants of Ant Colony Optimization for Network Routing

Abstract

<p>This paper suggests new variants of Ant Colony Optimization(ACO)Techniques for Network Routing. There are three existing variants of ACO based on pheromone deposit calculation. In our earlier work we suggested three different heuristics for selecting the next node at each step of iteration. Incorporation of these heuristics in each of the above three variants result into nine variations. In this paper the performance of these nine variations has been studied. Moreover, we have modified the pheromone deposit calculation considering the transmission time of each successful packet(ant) and incorporated this new pheromone update formula in each of the nine variants. As a result, we have obtained nine new variants of ACO. The performance of these new nine variants has been compared with previous ones with respect to the speed of execution, throughput and the number of successful packets. The experiments have been performed over two different network topologies. In one of the variant a tabu list has been incorporated. The length of the tabu list plays a vital role in improving the performance of the routing algorithm. In this paper it has been observed that the new variations of ACO have outperformed the previous ones. These new variants can perform efficient network routing in an environment having variable transmission time along the paths due to congestion or poor link quality.</p