Ant-Colony Based Heuristics to Minimize Power and Delay in the Internet

In networks like the Internet, it is desirable to reduce both power consumption and delays. In this paper, we propose an ant-colony heuristic algorithm which aims to minimize the product of the following two measures: consumed-power to available-bandwidth (PWR) and delay. Our current study is conducted using simulations on a topology which represents a 2-dimensional torus. We also compare the ant-colony based method with the well known Dijkstra´s shortest path algorithm. As compared to Dijkstra´s algorithm, we observe that the ant-colony heuristic can be computationally less intensive in obtaining a near optimal solution. This could be especially useful in large scale systems. As the PWR metric can be used across all levels of the Internet´s routing hierarchy, thus methods like ant-colony algorithms could lead to a reduction in both power consumption and delays.