ACO-inspired Information-Centric Networking routing mechanism

In recent years, the bio-inspired solution has been employed to address routing optimization issue intelligently without manual intervention. In this paper, we propose a novel Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)inspired Information-Centric Networking (ICN) Routing mechanism (ACOIR) by mapping ACO into ICN. At first, we devise a content management strategy based on the storage of name prefix to help conveniently and effectively manage and provide contents. Secondly, we propose a continuous model for content concentration by considering dynamic environment to conduct interest forwarding. Thirdly, we give a computation scheme about forwarding probability with physical distance and content concentration considered to determine the forwardable outgoing interface. Finally, we propose a comprehensive routing mechanism based on probabilistic forwarding to retrieve the most suitable content copy. We evaluate the proposed ACOIR, and the experimental results demonstrate that ACOIR can obtain the optimal solution and has better performance than other methods. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.