A Survey of Ant Colony Optimization-Based Approaches to Routing in Computer Networks

Nature has provided an elegant solution for the routing problem millions of years ago, when ant colonies started to use swarm intelligence to discover food and route it reliably to their formicaries. The approach utilized by ants has several advantages that are also useful in computer networks: complete distribution, load balancing, finding shortest paths with a high probability. Several routing protocols designed for the area of computer networks have made use of this approach, called ant colony optimization. This paper provides first a broad overview of ant colony optimization-based routing protocols, while focusing on four selected approaches in later sections, describing their operation and discussing their properties in detail.