Solenopsis: A Framework for the Development of Ant Algorithms

Network resources management issues in complex and dynamic scenarios require decentralized solutions and adaptive systems to face critical and unattended situations. Bio-inspired techniques such as swarm intelligence algorithms, have proved to be robust and suitable for managing tasks like routing, load-balancing or resource discovery. In this paper we describe Solenopsis, a framework for the development, simulation and deployment of ant-algorithms, which is aimed at supporting network management middlewares. The system provides a modular and scalable environment that can be distributed over a network. Ants are coded using a simple programming language, and are able to migrate across nodes. Two basic load-balancing algorithms are presented and evaluated, as an example of how this tool works and can be used in practice.