An Ant-Monitored Path-Flow Routing Algorithm for Next Generation Networks

Next generation telecommunication networks should support voice or data, wired or wireless, communication or broadcasting services in universal infrastructure by using integrated technology. For the QoS (quality of services) aware requests, a routing in the backbone network of the next generation networks seems to be a path-flow based and centralized routing. In this paper we suggest a path-flow routing algorithm for the next generation network that is assisted by ant colony behavior. In this algorithm ants monitor traffic of each path-flow in a given network, which can be changed dynamically. We use ants´ pheromone to monitor and record the network status to avoid delay and packet loss of the traffic. A routing decision for the updated traffic is made by solving a mathematical programming problem with an exact algorithm that was proposed in our previous work. We analyze the performance of our routing framework through simulation in various network instances. We can conclude that our ant-monitored algorithm shows some promising performance for the next generation path-flow networks