A Performance Evaluation Framework for Nature Inspired Routing Algorithms

Abstract

Performance evaluation of routing protocols is an important area of research that deals with the analysis and investigation of such protocols. A performance evaluation framework unveils different facets of a protocol and explores its behavior under diversified network operations. The nature inspired routing community, at the moment, lacks such a framework. Therefore, in this paper we propose a comprehensive performance evaluation framework that will empower the routing protocol designers to design state-of-the-art algorithms and extensively evaluate their performance. Using our framework, we exhaustively evaluated three state-of-the-art nature inspired routing algorithms. The results show some undiscovered aspects of the algorithms and provide valuable understanding about their merits and demerits. We believe that this will be the first major step in designing, standardizing and developing a performance evaluation library that will facilitate an extensive and unbiased evaluation of nature inspired routing algorithms.