1 APPLICATION OF ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION TO ADAPTIVE ROUTING IN A LEO TELECOMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE NETWORK

Ant colony optimization (ACO) has been proposed as a promising tool for adaptive routing in telecommunications networks. The algorithm is applied here to a simulation of a satellite telecommunications network with 72 LEO nodes and 121 earth stations. Three variants of ACO are tested in order to assess the relative importance of the different components of the algorithm. The best ACO variant consistently gives performance superior to that obtained with a standard link state algorithm (SPF), under a variety of traffic conditions, and at negligible cost in terms of routing bandwidth. Keywords: Telecommunications; adaptive routing; satellites; mobile agents; ant colony optimizatio