Multi-robot navigation based QoS routing in self-organizing networks

The technical development drives the future networks to become large-scale, heterogeneous, and dynamic. Bio-inspired networking can help reduce the time-space complexity of the complex network. Due to the good features such as self-organization and self-management, self-organizing network (SON) will most probably be a priority choice for the next generation network. In this paper, a swarm intelligence based Quality of Service (QoS) routing protocol is proposed for SON. The inaccurate routing and QoS information is described with fuzzy mathematics whilst the utilities of both the user and the network service provider are considered by applying game theory. Based on the multi-robot navigation algorithm, the protocol is able to search a routing path which can satisfy the user QoS requirements and achieve the Pareto optimal utilities of the user and the network service provider under Nash equilibrium. The proposed protocol is implemented and evaluated by extensive simulation experiments. The results show that it beats both other swarm intelligence based routing protocols and the traditional Dijkstra algorithm based routing protocol. The searched routing paths support the win–win effect for both the user and the network service provider.