A comprehensive formal framework for analyzing the behavior of nature-inspired routing protocols

Nature-inspired routing protocols are becoming an active area of research. Researchers in the community follow a well known engineering philosophy: inspire, abstract, design, develop and validate. As a consequence, the protocols are designed on the basis of heuristics and then their performance is evaluated in a network simulator. To the best of our knowledge, virtually no attention has been paid in developing a formal framework that provides an analytical insight into the behavior and performance of such algorithms. The lack of formal treatment of nature-inspired routing protocols is often criticized in the networking community. In this paper we propose a formal framework that helps in analyzing a nature-inspired routing protocol, BeeHive. We have verified the correctness of our model by comparing its estimated values with the results obtained from extensive network simulations. An important outcome of the work is that the estimated and measured values only differ by a small deviation. We believe that this work will be instrumental for nature-inspired Telecommunications.