A performance evaluation framework for nature inspired routing algorithms

Abstract. Performance evaluation of routing protocols is an important area of research that deals with the analysis and investigation of such protocols. A performance evaluation framework unveils different facets of a protocol and explores its behavior under diversified network oper-ations. The nature inspired routing community, at the moment, lacks such a framework. Therefore, in this paper we propose a comprehen-sive performance evaluation framework that will empower the routing protocol designers to design state-of-the-art algorithms and extensively evaluate their performance. Using our framework, we exhaustively eval-uated three state-of-the-art nature inspired routing algorithms. The re-sults show some undiscovered aspects of the algorithms and provide valu-able understanding about their merits and demerits. We believe that this will be the first major step in designing, standardizing and developing a performance evaluation library that will facilitate an extensive and unbiased evaluation of nature inspired routing algorithms.