QoS-aware Ant Routing with Colored Pheromones in Wireless Mesh Networks

Inspired by the collective foraging behavior of specific ant species, ant-based routing algorithms are able to find opti-mal or near optimal packet routes for Wireless Mesh Net-works. Ant-based algorithms work by deploying artificial pheromone at the network paths, which is then used for fu-ture routing decisions. Using this approach, the routing can be optimized ac-cording to different criteria like packet delay, delay jitter, or maximum bandwidth. For a typical mesh network, we assume to have different classes of traffic posing different re-quirements on the quality of service of the communication. Therefore, we propose a concept for ant routing with col-ored pheromones (CPANT), where a color corresponds to a particular class of traffic. Thus, the network will treat the packets of an application according to the specific applica-tion requirements packet delay, delay jitter, and bandwidth. We show that this approach can outperform ant routing ap-proaches that are not aware of different traffic classes when the specific traffic requirements are taken into account