Routing with Swarm Intelligence

This technical report describes how biologically inspired agents can be used to solve control and management problems in Telecommunications. These agents, inspired by the foraging behavior of ants, exhibit the desirable characteristics of simplicity of action and interaction. The collection of agents, or swarm system, deals only with local knowledge and exhibits a form of distributed control with agent communication effected through the environment. In the technical report we explore the application of ant-like agents to the problem of routing in circuit switched telecommunication networks. 1. Introduction Routing in telecommunication networks has mainly been static to date. With the advent of new technologies and, in particular, high capacity networks, much more flexibility will be required. Distance learning, video on demand, world wide information services such as WWW servers and many other services will create dynamic network load which should be taken care of by new algorithms...