Implementation and evaluation of AntNet, a distributed shortest-path algorithm

In the last decade, the OSPF (open shortest path first) routing protocol has proven its robustness, but it also has some major drawbacks. It reacts quite slowly to network changes, and load balancing is limited to paths with equal cost (ECMP). We present our implementation and evaluation of an alternative: AntNet (Di Caro, G. and Dorigo, M., "AntNet: A Mobile Agents Approach to Adaptive Routing", Technical Report IRIDIA, 1997). AntNet is a distributed shortest-path algorithm based on the principles of ant colony optimization that takes care of load balancing in a very natural way.