A Quality of Service Routing Scheme for Packet Switched Networks based on Ant Colony Behavior

Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees must be supported in a network that intends to carry real-time multimedia traffic effectively. A key problem in providing QoS guarantees is routing which consists of finding a path in a network that satisfies several constraints such as bandwidth, delay, delay jitter, etc. This paper proposes a novel QoS routing scheme called AntNet-QoS which provides QoS by adaptively learning routing tables in packet switched networks. AntNet-QoS is based on the socalled AntNet routing, a swarm intelligence router developed by G. Di Caro and M. Dorigo, that only considers delay when calculating the probabilities used in its routing tables. The innovative AntNet-QoS proposal is based on the utilization of different types of ants (routing packets) for the different classes of services (e.g. premium, best effort and so on) with different QoS requirements. AntNet-QoS considers parameters such as guaranteed bandwidth and maximum delay, enabling the distribution of different packet-based services using a model derived from standard AntNet.