A Comprehensive Survey of Nature-Inspired Routing Protocols

Abstract

The major contribution of the chapter is a comprehensive survey of existing state-of-the-art nature-inspired routing protocols developed by researchers who are trained in novel and different design doctrines and practices. Nature-inspired routing protocols have become the focus of research because they achieve the complex task of routing through simple agents which traverse the network and collect the routing information in an asynchronous fashion. Each node in the network has limited information about the state of the network, and it routes data packets to their destination based on this local information. The agent-based routing algorithms provide adaptive and efficient utilization of network resources in response to changes in the network, catering to load balancing and fault management. The chapter describes the important features of stigmergic routing algorithms, evolutionary routing algorithms, and artificial intelligence routing algorithms for fixed telecommunication networks. We also provide a summary of the protocols developed by the networking community. We believe that the survey will be instrumental in bridging the gaps among different communities involved in research of telecommunication networks.