AntNet: A Mobile Agents Approach to Adaptive Routing

This paper introduces AntNet, a new routing algorithm for communications networks. AntNet is an adaptive, distributed, mobile-agents-based algorithm which was inspired by recent work on the ant colony metaphor. We apply AntNet to a datagram network and compare it with both static and adaptive state-of-the-art routing algorithms. We ran experiments for various paradigmatic temporal and spatial tra c distributions. AntNet showed both very good performance and robustness under all the experimental conditions with respect to its competitors.

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