Ant Backpressure Routing for Wireless Multi-hop Networks with Mixed Traffic Patterns

Published in IEEE MILCOM, 2024

Recommended citation: Negar Erfaniantaghvayi, Zhongyuan Zhao, Kevin Chan, Gunjan Verma, Ananthram Swami, Santiago Segarra, " Ant Backpressure Routing for Wireless Multi-hop Networks with Mixed Traffic Patterns," IEEE Military Communications Conference, 28 October – 1 November 2024, Washington, DC, USA https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.12702

Our paper “Ant Backpressure Routing for Wireless Multi-hop Networks with Mixed Traffic Patterns” has been accepted to IEEE MILCOM 2024, and was presented by Negar Erfaniantaghvayi.

Related conference papers and code

Abstract

A mixture of streaming and short-lived traffic presents a common yet challenging scenario for Backpressure routing in wireless multi-hop networks. Although state-of-the-art shortest-path biased backpressure (SP-BP) can significantly improve the latency of backpressure routing while retaining throughput optimality, it still suffers from the last-packet problem due to its inherent per-commodity queue structure and link capacity assignment. To address this challenge, we propose Ant Backpressure (Ant-BP), a fully distributed routing scheme that incorporates the multi-path routing capability of SP-BP into ant colony optimization (ACO) routing, which allows packets of different commodities to share link capacity in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) manner. Numerical evaluations show that Ant-BP can improve the latency and delivery ratio over SP-BP and ACO routing schemes, while achieving the same throughput of SP-BP under low-to-medium traffic loads.

Key words: Wireless multi-hop networks, Backpressure routing, Max-Weight scheduling, Ant colony optimization