BeeHive: An efficient fault-tolerant routing algorithm inspired by honey bee behavior

Abstract

Bees organize their foraging activities as a social and communicative effort, indicating both the direction, distance and quality of food sources to their fellow foragers through a "dance" inside the bee hive (on the "dance floor"). In this paper we present a novel routing algorithm, BeeHive, which has been inspired by the communicative and evaluative methods and procedures of honey bees. In this algorithm, bee agents travel through network regions called foraging zones. On their way their information on the network state is delivered for updating the local routing tables. BeeHive is fault tolerant, scalable, and relies completely on local, or regional, information, respectively. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that BeeHive achieves a similar or better performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. © 2004 Springer-Verlag.