Restoration performance vs. overhead in a swarm intelligence path management system

Abstract

CE-ants is a distributed, robust and adaptive swarm intelligence strategy for dealing with path management in communication networks. This paper focuses on various strategies for adjusting the overhead generated by the CE-ants as the state of the network changes. The overhead is in terms of number of management packets (ants) generated, and the adjustments are done by controlling the ant generation rate that controls the number ants traversing the network. The link state events considered are failure and restoration events. A simulation scenario compares restoration performance of rate adaptation in the source node with rate adaptation in the intermediate nodes close to the link state events. Implicit detection of failure events through monitoring ant parameters are considered. Results indicate that an implicit adjustment in the source node is a promising approach with respect to restoration time and the number of ants required. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.