Proposal and Evaluation of Ant-Based Routing with Autonomous Zoning for Convergence Improvement

To tackle problems emerging with rapid growth of information networks in scale and complexity, bio-inspired self organization is considered one of promising design principles of a new generation network which is scalable, robust, adaptive, and sustainable. However, self-organizing systems would fall into a local optimum or never converge under some environmental conditions. Controlled or guided self-organization is a novel concept attracting many researchers in these years, where loose and moderate control is imposed on a self-organizing system to push it toward a desired state. In this paper, we take Ant Net, an ant-based routing protocol, as an example and consider a mechanism to accelerate convergence by limiting the search space. The proposed mechanism is compared with Ant Net and HOPNET from viewpoints of the convergence time, path length, and control overhead. Simulation results show that our proposal can accelerate convergence of ant-based routing to a shorter path than Ant Net and with lower control overhead than HOPNET.