Routing Protocols for Next-Generation Networks Inspired by Collective Behaviors of Insect Societies: An Overview

In this chapter we discuss the properties and review the main instances of network routing algorithms whose bottom-up design has been inspired by collective behaviors of social insects such as ants and bees. This class of bio-inspired routing algorithms includes a relatively large number of algorithms mostly developed during the last ten years. The characteristics inherited by the biological systems of inspiration almost naturally empower these algorithms with characteristics such as autonomy, self-organization, adaptivity, robustness, and scalability, which are all desirable if not necessary properties to deal with the challenges of current and next-generation networks. In the chapter we consider different classes of wired and wireless networks, and for each class we briefly discuss the characteristics of the main ant- and bee-colony-inspired algorithms which can be found in literature. We point out their distinctive features and discuss their general pros and cons in relationship to the state of the art.