Mobile agents for adaptive routing

This paper introduces AntNet, a new routing algorithm for telecommunication networks. AntNet is an adaptive, distributed, mobile-agents-based algorithm which was inspired by recent work on the ant colony metaphor. We apply AntNet in a datagram network and compare it with both static and adaptive state-of-the-art routing algorithms. We ran experiments for various paradigmatic temporal and spatial traffic distributions. AntNet showed both very good performances and robustness under all the experimental conditions with respect to its competitors