Traffic Engineering and Restoration in Optical Packet Switching Networks by means of Ant Colony Optimization

In this paper, we propose an ACO-based algorithm that can adaptively balance the network load to mitigate congestion, and hence reduce the overall loss of packets in an OPS network. In addition, the proposed algorithm is fault-tolerant, with the recovery from a failed link or node starting even before detection and localization of the failure event. Since both routing and restoration rely on pheromone levels laid by ant-like agents, any failure will be promptly perceived by some ants, which will then try to circumvent the affected part of the network, thus adapting the routing to the new topology.