Distributed and scalable path management by a system of cooperating ants

Path management in next generation networks will be computationally excessive if guarantied quality of service is to be offered. Route computations subject to many and changing requirements set forth by a range of applications is far from straight forward when applying state-of-the-art routing systems. Robust and adaptive swarm based systems are candidates to handle future path management challenges. One such system, the Cross Entropy Ants System (CEAS), provides stochastic, asynchronous and truly distributed path management. In most management systems there is a trade-off between performance and management overhead. This paper presents an improved version of CEAS, denoted Subpath CEAS. Significant savings are observed in memory usage, and in the number of control packets generated, without loss of performance or added processing. To achieve this, end-to-end paths with the same destination and QoS requirements are made to share and exploit information about their common sub-paths.