The DTN Routing Problem: Exploitation versus Exploration of Solutions

Designed to Delay Tolerant Networks, the Cultural Greedy GrAnt (CGrAnt) routing protocol uses Ant Colony Optimization to represent the population space of a Cultural Algorithm. CGrAnt aims to improve the message forwarding by analyzing the network characteristics based on three distinct knowledge: Domain, History, and Situational. The Domain knowledge plays a central role in the CGrAnt operation as it provides a good balance between search space exploration (through the selection of new solutions) and exploitation (through the selection of previously found solutions). This work proposes alternative metrics to be used by the Domain knowledge of CGrAnt. Results show that the new proposed metrics increase the CGrAnt performance.