Evaluation of the SCTP Optimal Path Selection with Ant Colony Optimization Probabilistic Equation Implementation

This paper evaluates the proposed SCTP optimal path selection mechanism which implements the Ant Colony Optimization probabilistic equation. The proposed mechanism uses three parameters, which are the path delay, RSSI level at the mobile node and the RSSI level at the corresponding node, as the decision criteria. A cross-layer architecture is proposed to obtain the value from the Physical layer. In addition, a new parameter for the SCTP Heartbeat chunk is introduced in order to share the RSSI information between the nodes in the SCTP association. A brief comparison between using two parameters (path delay and RSSI at mobile node only) and three parameters (plus RSSI at the corresponding node) is also included. The experimental evaluations show that the proposed mechanism is able to select the optimal path.