A Distributed Ant Colony Algorithm Based on Cross-Entropy for Multi-Constraints QoS Routing

Many applications in the network have strict demands for QoS, such as bandwidth, delay, packet loss rate, etc. Finding the best routing to satisfy those requirements is, in general, an NP-hard problem. Many heuristic algorithms are used to solve this problem, which, however, either belonging to local search or centralized algorithms, cannot guarantee the finding of best solutions in real networks. In this paper, we propose a distributed ant colony algorithm based on cross-entropy for multi-constraints routing. Simulation results in NS-2 environment indicate that this algorithm can quickly find the best solution.