A Formal Framework for Analyzing the Behavior of BeeHive

The major contribution of this chapter is a formal framework that helps in analyzing the behavior of our BeeHive routing protocol. To the best of our knowledge, researchers in our community have paid little attention to developing such a formal framework that provides analytical insight into the behavior and performance of nature-inspired routing algorithms. Instead, most of them follow a classical well-known engineering philosophy: inspire, abstract, design, develop, and validate. As a consequence, the protocols are designed on the basis of heuristics, and then their performance is evaluated in a network simulator. In line with this practice, we verified the correctness of our model by comparing its estimated values with the results obtained from network simulations in OMNeT++. An important outcome of the work is that the estimated and measured values only differ by a small deviation. We believe that this work will significantly contribute in developing a formal theory of nature-inspired routing protocols that will ultimately help in their acceptability in the networking industry.