The Cross Entropy Ant System for Network Path Management
Poul E. Heegaard, Bjarne E. Helvik, Otto J. Wittner · 2008
With the above in mind, we have developed a distributed, robust and adaptive swarm intelligence system for dealing with path management in communication networks. The system is called the Cross Entropy Ant System (CEAS), and is based on increasing the probability of finding a (near) optimal solution by an increasingly focused random search. As a background for the system, this paper gives a brief discussion on path finding challenges and trade-offs. Following up is a description of CEAS where its robustness and adaptivity are demonstrated on a variety of case studies using different management strategies, like: shared backup path protection (SBPP), p-cycles, resource search under QoS constraints and adaptive paths with stochastic routing. This paper also includes a description of a running implementation of CEAS based on small home routers. The implementation demonstrates and visualises the inner workings of the method.