A Scalability Framework for Nature-Inspired Routing Algorithms

The major contribution of the work presented in this chapter is a comprehensive framework for the scalability analysis of distributed routing protocols. The framework models the productivity of a routing protocol on a number of performance values. The cost model consists of processing, communication, and resource costs for deploying a routing algorithm in an operational environment in real-world networks. The framework is general enough and can be easily utilized to investigate the scalability of an agent-based distributed software system. Finally, we studied the scalability behavior of two state-of-the-art nature-inspired agent-based routing protocols: AntNet and BeeHive. We also evaluated the scalability of OSPF, which is currently employed in the Internet. The results give valuable insight into the scaling capacity of agent-based routing algorithms. We believe that the work will motivate designers of routing protocols to consider scalability as an important metric in the design and development of state-of-the-art routing protocols and to empirically validate them according to this measure.