A dynamic Ant Colony Optimization for load balancing in MRN/MLN

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a popular research field these years. Ants choose paths where pheromone concentration is higher and modify the environment they visited. However, in the context of multi-service in multi-level and multi-domain optical network, the capacity of inter-domain links is limited. Congestion may be occurred at inter-domain links. In this paper, ant colony optimization algorithm based on load balancing is proposed. Ants follow paths not just depend on pheromone alone, we also take available resources on the link as a factor too. Simulations show the proposed method could reduce the traffic blocking probability, and realize load balancing within the network.