Opportunistic Ant-based path management for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

This paper introduces opportunistic ant-based path management for wireless mesh networks. The idea is to take advantage of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium by deferring the selection of the next-hop to the receivers of an ant. From an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) viewpoint, the main shift is that the probabilistic forwarding decision rule is no longer executed locally at the transmitting node and in the spatial domain, but in a distributed manner among the potential forwarders and in the time domain. Early simulation results indicate that this approach improves the performance of the system in terms of convergence time, ability to adapt to changes and overhead. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.