Evaluations of Ant Colony Optimization Inspired SCTP Optimal Path Selection Using E-model

This paper proposes an SCTP optimal path selection mechanism which is inspired by the Ant Colony Optimization probabilistic equation. The proposed mechanism uses three parameters, which are the path delay, RSSI level at the mobile node and the RSSI level at the corresponding node, as the decision criteria. A cross-layer architecture is proposed to obtain the value from the Physical layer. In addition, a new parameter for the SCTP Heartbeat chunk is introduced in order to share the RSSI information between the nodes in the SCTP association. The proposed work was evaluated using two types of scenarios. Then the result was translated into the R-factor using the E-Model recommended by ITU-T. The results show that the mechanism was able to find the optimal path for the user.