Improved antnet routing algorithm with link probability evaporation over the given time window

Antnet is a software agent based routing algorithm that is influenced by the unsophisticated and individual ants emergent behaviour. In real life, ants deposit some kind of chemical substance to mark the path that they used. Then on their way back they choose the path with the most pheromones which becomes the shortest path. Ants (nothing but software agents) in antnet are used to collect traffic information and to update the probabilistic distance vector routing table entries. In the original antnet algorithm the only feedback provided to the system by the software agents is the trip time observed on their way to source to destination. Then this feedback signal is reinforced by updating the related probability entry in the distance vector table. In this work link usage information is used as the second feedback to the system. For every link the usage information is held at every node that they are connected in a given time window. Routing table entries then reinforced based on the calculated evaporation information based on the link usage statistics. This is influenced from the real life scenario where chemical substance deposited by the ants evaporates over time. Simulation results show that average delay experienced by data packets is reduced by ~7% by evaporating link probabilities under non-uniform traffic model. However, there was no performance gain on the uniform traffic models.