Analysis on extended ant routing algorithms for network routing and management

Advances in mobile agent research have brought in a new method for network routing, ant routing. Recently, we have derived some preliminary results regarding the agent population growth property and the jumping behavior for an ant routing algorithm. The focus was on the expected number of agents in a node. In practice, the number of agents propagating on each network channel is also critical as the network channel bandwidth is limited. In this paper, we first propose two extended ant routing algorithms, and then provide an in-depth analysis on the population growth behavior of the propagating agents for these algorithms, both at nodes (hosts) and on edges (channels) of the network.