Bio-inspired Load Balancing Routing for Delay-Guaranteed Services in Ever-Changing Networks

Abstract

We consider a new load balancing routing for delay-guaranteed services in the network in which the traffic is dynamic and network topologies frequently change. For such an ever-changing network, we propose a new online load balancing routing called AntLBR, which exploits the ant colony optimization method. Generally, to achieve load balancing, researchers have tried to calculate the traffic split ratio by solving a complicated linear programming (LP) problem under the static network environment. In contrast, the proposed AntLBR does not make any attempt to solve this complicated LP problem. So as to achieve load balancing, AntLBR simply forwards incoming flows by referring to the amount of pheromone trails. Simulation results indicate that the AntLBR algorithm achieves a more load-balanced network under the changing network environment than techniques used in previous research while guaranteeing the requirements of delay-guaranteed services.