2016 IEEE 28th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence
Optimizing Routing Rules Space through Traffic
Engineering Based on Ant Colony Algorithm in
Software Defined Network
Chuangen Gao, Hua Wang*, Linbo Zhai, Shanwen Yi, Xibo Yao
School of Computer Science and Technology
Shandong University
Jinan, China
*Corresponding author. e-mail: wanghua@sdu.edu.cn
Abstract—Software Defined Network (SDN) has been
envisioned as the next generation network infrastructure, which
simplify network management by decoupling the control plane
and data plane. It is becoming the leading technology behind
many traffic engineering solutions, since it allows a central
controller to globally plan the paths of the flows. However,
Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM), as a critical
hardware storing rules in SDN-enabled devices, can be supplied
to each device with very limited quantity because it is expensive
and energy-consuming. To efficiently use TCAM resources, we
address the routing rule space occupation problem for multiple
unicast sessions with Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints. To
our best knowledge, this is the first work to joint routing rule
optimization with traffic engineering for multipath flows. We
formulate the problem using Mixed Integer Linear Programing
(MILP) and propose an approach based on ant colony algorithm
to solve it. Finally, we evaluate the expected performance of our
proposed algorithm through a simulation study.
Keywords—routing rule; traffic engineering; ant colony
optimization; software defined network
I. INTRODUCTION
Software Defined Network (SDN) is a promising network
paradigm that separates the control plane and data plane. It has
shown great advantages in simplifying network management
such that new functions can be easily supported without
physical access to the network switches. The data forwarding
behavior of network elements is determined by a centralized
controller. This separation of the control plane from the data
plane allows network operators to gain a fine grain control
over the actual way packets are forwarded, and thus better
utilize their network. For this reason SDN is becoming the
leading technology behind many traffic engineering solutions
both for backbone and data center network [1].
In SDN, a logically centralized controller that fetches
information from the network, computes appropriate routes
according to the operator wills and network conditions, and
then transparently pushes the corresponding forwarding rules
into the switches. Each network device stores forwarding rules
in its local Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM)
that supports high-speed parallel lookup on wildcard patterns
[2]. Network operators can establish multiple paths between
source–destination pairs in software defined network. And
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DOI 10.1109/ICTAI.2016.23
each path requires an entry in the expensive (TCAM)
forwarding table of each switch it traverses. Without loss of
generality, one forwarding rule is used for at most one flow.
Each time a new application flow starts, the controller picks
several paths through a series of OpenFlow Switches, and
adds a new flow entry to every switch along the chosen paths.
When subsequent packets arrive at a switch, they are
processed quickly by the Flow Table [3].
While TCAM excels in packet processing, it is an
expensive hardware with high energy consumption. For
example, TCAM ternary match is 6 times expensive than
Hash-based binary match in Static-RAM. Further, it is
reported that TCAMs are 400 times more expensive and 100
times more power-consuming per Mbit than RAM-base
storage. As a result, each network device can only be equipped
with limited TCAM [2]. A large network may require
hundreds of thousands of path flow table entries at each switch
[4], while according to today’s technology, a commodity
OpenFlow switch typically support rule size from 2K to 20K
only, far below what is required for an exhaustive network
management. It is also indicated that datacenter scaling is
made difficult by the forwarding table size, which increases
linearly with the size of the system [5]. The shortage of TCAM
motivates us to investigate efficient routing rules optimization
problem in SDN.
Single-path routing has been widely used for unicast
sessions because of its simplicity. However, using multiple
paths for a traffic flow is useful when it would be insufficient
to satisfy the bandwidth requirement. A simple example of the
advantages of multipath routing is illustrated in Fig.1(a).,
where each link has only 1 Gb/s available bandwidth.
Supposing that we would like to route a 1.5-Gb/s traffic flow
from ‫ݏ‬ଵ to ‫ݐ‬ଵ , unfortunately the default (shortest) path,ܽ ՜
ܾ, can achieve a throughput at most 1-Gb/s. In this case, to
achieve the required bandwidth, multiple paths can be
employed for packet delivery. The traffic flow can be split
such that 1 Gb/s will be routed over the path ܽ ՜ ܾ, and 0.5
Gb/s over the pathܿ ՜ ݀ ՜ ݁.
However, splitting a traffic flow over multiple paths
consumes extra “forwarding resources” from the network
nodes leading to high TCAM consumption. These resources
are proportional to the number of nodes/links traversed by
these paths. In this paper, considering a set of unicast sessions,
each of which is associated with a bandwidth demand to
guarantee a certain level of Quality-of-Service (QoS), and
taking the flow table limitation of each switch into account,
we define the Routing Rule Space Optimization Problem
(RSP) for multiple unicast sessions as follows: given a
network and bandwidth demands of a set of pairs of ingress
and egress nodes, find a feasible set of paths that satisfies these
demands and imposes minimum flow table entries.
a b
S1 t1
0.5 0.5
c d e hides internal topology details. The policy specifies which
0.5 0.5
S2 t2
f g h i
(a)
a b
0.5
S1 t1
1 1
c d e to address the endpoint policy rules. DIFANE [7] and vCRIB
S2 t2
f g h i
(b)
Fig. 1. An example for the routing rule optimization problem
The basic idea is also explained by example in Fig.1,
where each link has only 1 Gb/s available bandwidth. Suppose
that we would like to route a 1.5-Gb/s traffic flow from ‫ݏ‬ଵ to
‫ݐ‬ଵ and a 0.5-Gb/s traffic flow from ‫ݏ‬ଶ to ‫ݐ‬ଶ
simultaneously. As illustrated in Fig.1(a), the traffic flow from
‫ݏ‬ଵ to ‫ݐ‬ଵ (indicated by solid line) is split such that 1 Gb/s will
be routed over the path ܽ ՜ ܾ, and 0.5 Gb/s over the pathܿ ՜
݀ ՜ ݁, and traffic flow 0.5 Gb/s from ‫ݏ‬ଶ to ‫ݐ‬ଶ (indicated by
dotted line ) is routed over the pathܿ ՜ ݀ ՜ ݁. So the flow
table entries produced by the routing solution is 2+3+3 = 8.
The best routing solution is illustrated in Fig.1(b). The traffic
flow from ‫ݏ‬ଵ to ‫ݐ‬ଵ is split such that 0.5 Gb/s will be routed
over the path ܽ ՜ ܾ, and 1 Gb/s over the pathܿ ՜ ݀ ՜ ݁,
and traffic flow 0.5 Gb/s from ‫ݏ‬ଶ to ‫ݐ‬ଶ is routed over the
pathܽ ՜ ܾ. So the flow table entries produced by the routing
solution is 2+3+2 = 7.
In summary, we make the following contributions:
z To our best knowledge, this is the first work that
address the routing rule space optimization problem
for multiple unicast sessions with QoS guarantees
through traffic engineering. And we formulate the
above optimization problem using Mixed Integer
Linear Programing (MILP) for the first time.
z We propose a CloneAnt-based ant colony algorithm to
solve the problem, and define two types of pheromone.
The first one is a local pheromone which is used to
guide the rule optimization for a single session. The
other one is a global pheromone which is used to guide
the overall rules optimization for all sessions.
107
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: The
related work is reported in section II. The Mathematical
Model is depicted in section III. Our core algorithm and
pseudo code are presented in section IV. The results of
simulations and discussion of the performance are reported in
section V. Finally, concluding remarks follow in Section VI.
II. RELATED WORK
Rule optimization in SDN has been largely covered over
the last years. Part of the related work deals with the endpoint
policy rules. Endpoint policies which are driven by high level
economical and technical considerations, like access control
and load balancing, view the network as one big switch that
packets to drop, or to forward to specific egress ports, as well
as any modifications of header fields [6]. The other part,
which is more relevant to our work, processes routing policy
rules. The routing policy specifies what paths traffic should
follow between the ingress and egress ports. The routing
policy is driven by traffic engineering goals, such as
minimizing congestion and end to end latency [6].
For the first part, several mechanisms have been proposed
[8] have been proposed to leverage all switches in a network
to realize endpoint policies. Specifically, DIFANE places the
most important rules at some additional devices, called
authority switches. Then, ingress switches redirect
unmatching packets towards these specific devices, which
enables reducing load on the controller and, at the same time,
decreasing the number of rules required to be stored on ingress
switches. vCRIB installs rules on both hypervisors and
switches to increase performance while limiting resource
usage. Palette [9] and OneBigSwitch [6] produce the
aggregated rule sets that satisfy the endpoint policy and place
them on switches while respecting the routing policy and
minimizing the resources. Specifically, Palette have proposed
a framework for decomposing large SDN tables into small
ones and then distributing them across the network, while
preserving overall SDN policy semantics. To efficiently use
TCAM resources for endpoint policies, paper [2] propose a
rule multiplexing scheme, in which the same set of rules
deployed on each node apply to the whole flow of a session
going through but towards different paths. They formulate the
optimization problem jointly considering routing engineering
and rule placement under both existing and our rule
multiplexing schemes. All the above works address the
endpoint policy rules, while our paper deals with the routing
rules.
As for the second part, several mechanisms have been
proposed to address the routing rules, and our work is also
belong to this category. In [10], the rule allocation is modeled
as a constrained optimization problem focusing on the
minimization of the overall energy consumption of switches
while respecting capacity constraints on links and rule space
constraints on routers. Apparently its optimization objective is
different from ours. The OFFICER proposed in [11] is a
general algorithm to calculate and implement efficient
forwarding rules in switches. It tries to get the maximum from
the available resources by adapting the routes followed by the
different packets towards their desired egress links. Besides it
treats the network as a black box that must satisfy the endpoint
policy imposed by the operator. The model assigns one
forwarding path per flow, and as a result all the packets of a
flow follow the same path to the egress link. But our model
adopt multipath routing such that a flow could be forwarded
on several paths.
The relevant problem of Routing with Minimum node for
a single session is proposed in paper [5], which is proved to
be NP-complete. There is no doubt that routing with minimum
node for a set of sessions is NP-hard. Some notation used in
this paper are listed in Table 1.
Table 1. Notation used in this paper

The most relevant past work is paper [5]. The paper Notation Description
investigate the problem of minimizing the control load while
delivering a given amount of traffic between a pair of ingress ܰ a set of network devices
and egress nodes. It defined the Routing with Minimum  a set of links among devices
Control Load problem in which the control load is measure by
the number of nodes they traverse. Throughout the paper they ‫ܥ‬௨ TCAM capacity of node ‫ݑ‬
focus on the case where flows are admitted one by one, in ‫ܤ‬௨௩ bandwidth of link ሺ‫ݑ‬ǡ ‫ݒ‬ሻ ‫ܧ א‬
other words “one flow at a time” scenario, while our work are
scenarios where the operator can admit many flows at the ‫ܭ‬ a set of unicast sessions
same time. traffic demand required by session ݇ from
‫ݎ‬௞
‫ݏ‬௞ ‫݀ ݋ݐ‬௞
While the related works presented above focus on
particular aspects of the rule allocation problem, we are the ‫ܮ‬௞ a set of paths for session k
first to propose a routing rule optimization problem through ௞௟ a binary variable indicating whether the link ሺ‫ݑ‬ǡ ‫ݒ‬ሻ
‫ݔ‬௨௩
traffic engineering for multiple unicast sessions to minimizing is on the path ݈of session ݇
the number of routing entries in SDN. a real variable representing the transmission rate on
݂௟௞
path ݈ of session ݇
III. MATHEMATICAL FORMULATION
B. Mathematical Model
A. Problem Statement
Note that the number of nodes on the path is equal to the
We model the SDN as a graph ‫ ܩ‬ൌ ሺܰǡ ‫ܧ‬ሻ, where node number of edges. The routing rule space occupation problem
set ܰ consists of SDN-enabled network devices, and edge set can therefore be formulated as:
‫ ܧ‬represents the communication links among devices. Each
device ‫ ܰ א ݑ‬maintains a TCAM-based flow table that can
accommodate at most ‫ܥ‬௨ rules. The bandwidth of each link
Minimize ¦¦¦
k∈ K l∈ Lk (u ,v )∈ E
xuvkl (1)
ሺ‫ݑ‬ǡ ‫ݒ‬ሻ  ‫ ܧ א‬is constrained by ‫ܤ‬௨௩ .
Subject to:
We consider a set of ‫ܭ‬unicast sessions, and each session
݇ ‫ ܭ א‬imposes a QoS requirement with bandwidth ‫ݎ‬௞ from ­1 ∀ l ∈ Lk , ∀ k ∈ K, u = sk
a source •௞ to destination ݀௞ . Traffic demands are °
represented as the set of source-destination pairs, denoted as ¦ x − ¦ x = ®−1
kl
uv
kl
vu ∀ l ∈ Lk , ∀ k ∈ K, u = dk (2)
‫ ܭ‬ൌ ሼ൏ ‫ݏ‬ଵ ǡ ݀ଵ ǡ ‫ݎ‬ଵ ൐ǡ ൏ ‫ݏ‬ଶ ǡ ݀ଶ ǡ ‫ݎ‬ଶ ൐ǡ ǥ ሽ. For each demand pair
v∈N v∈N °0 ∀ l ∈ Lk , ∀ k ∈ K, u ≠ sk , dk
¯
൏ ‫ݏ‬௞ ǡ ݀௞ ǡ ‫ݎ‬௞ ൐‫ܭ א‬, ‫ݏ‬௞ represent the source,݀௞ denotes the
destination, and ‫ݎ‬௞ denotes traffic demand respectively. The
terms “source-destination pair” and “session” will be used
¦f
l ∈ Lk
l
k
≥ r k , ∀ k ∈K (3)
interchangeably in this paper.
All network and traffic demand information is maintained ¦¦ x
k∈K l∈Lk
kl k
uv l f ≤ Buv , ∀ (u, v) ∈ E (4)
at the centralized controller that has a global view of the SDN.
With the given ‫ ܭ‬unicast sessions and their bandwidth
requirements, we find a set of paths for all sessions ‫ ܭ‬under ¦ ¦ ¦x
k∈K l∈Lk v∈N
kl
uv ≤ Cu , ∀ u ∈ N (5)
their bandwidth constraints with the objective to minimize the
total routing rule space occupation. And the set of ‫ܮ‬௞ x uvkl ∈ {0,1} , f l k > 0 (6)
represents the paths selected for session k‫ܭ א‬.
The path searching process is represented by constraint
Because each node traversal requires one entry in the
(2). At the source node ‫ݏ‬௞ , the number of outgoing links
forwarding table of that node, the routing rule space
minus that of incoming links should be equal to ͳ. And it
occupation can be measured by the number of nodes that carry
equal to െͳ at the destination node ݀௞ . At each intermediate
the paths. For the reason, we redefine the Routing Rule Space
node, the number of incoming link should be equal to the
Optimization Problem (RSP) for multiple unicast sessions as
number of outgoing link. Constraint (3) guarantees the
follows: given ‫ ܭ‬unicast sessions and their bandwidth
bandwidth requirement of each session ݇ ‫ ܭ א‬by letting the
requirements, find a set of paths for all the sessions to
minimize the number of nodes traversed by the paths. total transmission rate of all selected paths be greater than ‫ݎ‬௞ .
Constraint (4) accounts for bandwidth limitation and ensures
that the sum of the rates of the flows crossing a link ሺ‫ݑ‬ǡ ‫ݒ‬ሻ

108
does not exceed its capacity. The number of rules placed at
node ‫ ܰ א ݑ‬cannot exceed its rule space capacity as
represented by constraint (5).
We first formulate the above problem with a mixed integer
linear programming (MILP) which is one of the contributions
of our work. And the problem is NP-hard that cannot be solved
in polynomial time. It means that we will spend much time
finding out a feasible routing solution in large-scale networks.
Consequently, we design a heuristic algorithm to tackle this
problem.
IV. CLONE ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION FOR RSP
A. Description of CACO-RSP
1) Basic idea
For routing rule space problem, we propose a Clone Ant
Colony Optimization algorithm(CACO-RSP). This is a
routing rule optimization algorithm based on clone ants. It
seeks the paths that traverse nodes as less as possible for a set
of sessions satisfying bandwidth demand. So that routing the
flow on the least nodes to achieve the purpose of optimizing
the rules.
In this algorithm, we propose a parallel searching way of
ants. In the beginning, all the ants are located at the source
nodes respectively. According to the transition probability all
the ants step forward to next node, deposit the corresponding
pheromone on the path, and save the nodes passing by. During
the process of movement, the ants clone themselves when the
current link bandwidth is unavailable dynamically. When all
the ants reach the destination nodes, we get a feasible solution,
a set of paths for all source-destination pairs satisfying their
traffic demands, and pheromone updates according to results
of the iteration.
2) Definition of Clone Ant
We denote an clone ant as ‫ ݐ݊ܣ݁݊݋݈ܥ‬ൌ൏
‫݁ܿݎݑ݋ݏ‬ǡ ݀݁‫݊݋݅ݐܽ݊݅ݐݏ‬ǡ ݈‫݊݋݅ݐܽܿ݋‬ǡ ܾܽ݊݀‫݄ݐ݀݅ݓ‬ǡ ‫ ݄ݐܽ݌‬൐ , in
which the tuple source and destination represents the source
node and the destination node respectively, location
represents the current location of ant, bandwidth is
bandwidth demand required from source to destination, and
path is a vector used to save the paths the ant has passed by.
A clone ant can divide itself, namely split up into two
almost identical ants, and the two ants are similar and
complementary, that is to say, the elements source,
destination, location and path have the same value, but the
sum of their bandwidth equals to the original ant’s bandwidth.
We will use an example to explain how a clone ant divides
itself: We assume the original ant CA=<s, d, x, B, path>, and
one of adjacent nodes of ‫ ݔ‬is next_‫ݔ‬. After splitting up, the
original ant generates two new ants:‫ܣܥ‬ଵ ൌ൏ ‫ݏ‬ǡ ݀ǡ ‫ݔ‬ǡ ܾଵ ǡ
‫݄ݐܽ݌‬ଵ ൐ and ‫ܣܥ‬ଶ ൌ൏ ‫ݏ‬ǡ ݀ǡ ‫ݔ‬ǡ ܾଶ ǡ ‫݄ݐܽ݌‬ଶ ൐, where ܾଵ ൅
ܾଶ ൌ ‫ܤ‬㸪‫݄ݐܽ݌‬ଵ ൌ ‫݄ݐܽ݌‬ଶ ൌ ‫݄ݐܽ݌‬.
3) Candidate link set and Path set
The candidate link set is a set of 4-tuples, denoted as
candidate={<next, bandwidth, rule, probability> | satisfying
constraints}, in which next is one of the adjacent nodes and
109
must be unvisited, ܾܽ݊݀‫ ݄ݐ݀݅ݓ‬and rule is available
bandwidth and available rule space of the adjacent node and
limited to be positive number respectively, ‫ݕݐ݈ܾܾ݅݅ܽ݋ݎ݌‬
represents transition probability that can be computed
according to Eq. (11). Since any change of an ant’s state lead
to the change of the whole searching space, we will generate
the candidate set in real time and take advantage of roulette
wheel to select the next node.
The path set is a set of composite 2-tuples, denoted as
PathSet={<path1, bw1>, < path2, bw2>,…}. For <path, bw>
‫א‬PathSet, path is a vector used to save a simple path and ܾ‫ݓ‬
is the bandwidth occupied by this path. A ܲܽ‫ ݐ݄݁ܵݐ‬is used
to store the searching results of all ants.
4) Updating pheromones and Transition probability
We define two types of pheromone. The first one called a
local pheromone which is used to guide the rule optimization
for a single session. The other one is a global pheromone
which is used to guide the overall rules optimization for all
sessions. Specifically, there are ‫ ܭ‬kinds of local pheromones
distributed along the path, since we generate a local
pheromone for the each unicast session, where K is the
number of unicast sessions demands. There is only one kind
௞
of global pheromone for all sessions. We use ߬௜௝ to denote
௚
local pheromone for unicast session ݇on linkሺ݅ǡ ݆ሻ, and ߬௜௝
denotes global pheromone on link ሺ݅ǡ ݆ሻ.
In our proposed algorithm, the pheromone updating
process includes two steps: a local pheromone update and a
global pheromone update, which is applied after all ants have
finished building a solution. Initially, all kinds of pheromones
on all paths are set to constant. After each iteration, all local
pheromone are updated according to the below formula:
τ ij k ( t + 1) = (1 − ρ l )τ ij k ( t ) + Δ τ ijk ( t ) (7)
௞
where߬௜௝ ሺ‫ ݐ‬൅ ͳሻ denotes the local pheromone intensity of
session ݇ distributed on the link ሺ݅ǡ ݆ሻ, and ߩ௟ represents
local evaporating parameter used to control the evaporating
speed of local pheromone, we set ߩ௟ ൌ ͲǤ͵ in practice on the
௞
basis of experience. ο߬௜௝ ሺ‫ݐ‬ሻ denotes the increment of
pheromone of session ݇ after the ‫ ݄ݐ̴ݐ‬iteration.
1
Δτ ijk (t ) = k (8)
R (t )
where ܴ௞ ሺ‫ݐ‬ሻ denotes the routing rule occupation of session
݇after the ‫ ݄ݐ̴ݐ‬iteration. Apparently the fewer routing rule
occupation, the more increment of pheromones.
The global update is performed by applying the following
rule:
τ ij g ( t + 1) = (1 − ρ g )τ ij g ( t ) + Δ τ ijg ( t ) (9)
where ߩ௚ is the pheromone evaporation parameter of global
updating. We set ߩ௚ ൌ ͲǤ͵ͷ in practice on the basis of
௚
experience. ο߬௜௝ ሺ‫ݐ‬ሻ denotes the increment of global
pheromone of all session ݇ after the ‫ ݄ݐ̴ݐ‬iteration.
 1 as const. Set the maximum iteration.
Δ τ ijg (t ) =
R (t )
where ܴሺ‫ݐ‬ሻ denotes the total routing rule occupation of all
sessions after the ‫ ݄ݐ̴ݐ‬iteration.
Apart from pheromone trails, another important factor in
CACO-RSP is the choice of a good heuristic information,
which will be used in combination with the pheromone
information to build solutions. The first heuristic information
considers the bandwidth available from adjacent node݆ to the
destination node ݀. The rationale behind this procedure is to
greedily use the available paths in the network. Apparently the
larger the bandwidth of selected path for a flow is, then the
less paths is occupied by a flow. And with fewer the number
of paths, the number of nodes that carry the paths will be less.
The second heuristic information considers the path length
which is measured by hopes from adjacent node݆ to the
destination node ݀. The rationale behind this procedure is to
use short paths, which traverse fewer nodes. In general, it is
better to choose wider and shorter paths for a network flow,
regardless of the network size and node average degree.
The formula of transition probability is as below:
(τ ij k (t ))α *(τ ij g (t ))β *(ηij (t ))γ *(Bij (t ))λ
P (t ) =
k
(τ is k (t ))α *(τ is g (t ))β ∗ (ηis (t ))γ *(Bis (t ))λ
ij
¦ 2. Select a link with roulette from the candidate link
s∈allowedi (t )
where ܲ௜௝௞ (t)
denotes the probability of moving from ݅ to ݆
on the t-th iteration of ants for session ݇, it consists of four
factors: local pheromone, global pheromone, distance
heuristic and bandwidth heuristic information. The
parameters of ߙǡ ߚǡ ߛǡ ߣ are used to adjust their weights; the
adjustment of these parameters must be based on experience
and experiments. In this paper, we set them ʹǡ͵ǡ ͳǡͳ
respectively. The distance heuristic ߟ௜௝ ሺ‫ݐ‬ሻ ൌ ͳΤ݀ሺ݅ǡ ݀ሻ ,
where ݀ሺ݅ǡ ݀ሻ ൌ ݀ሺ݅ǡ ݆ሻ ൅ ‫݌ݏ‬ሺ݆ǡ ݀ሻ and ‫݌ݏ‬ሺ݆ǡ ݀ሻ represents
the shortest path which measured by number of hops from ݆
to ݀; the shortest path can be solved by famous Dijkstra
algorithm in polynomial time. The bandwidth heuristic
information ‫ܤ‬௜௝ ሺ‫ݐ‬ሻ ൌ ͳΤ‫ܤ‬ሺ݅ǡ ݆ǡ ݀ሻ , where ‫ܤ‬ሺ݅ǡ ݆ǡ ݀ሻ
represents the max bandwidth available from ݅ to ݀
crossing node ݆ which can be calculated by Maximum-Path
algorithm proposed in paper [12].
B. Algorithm implemention
1) Framework of the Algorithm
Input: Network topology ‫ܩ‬ሺܰǡ ‫ܧ‬ሻ with link capacity
constraints and TCAM capacity of node, and traffic
demand ‫ ܭ‬ൌ ሼ൏ ‫ݏ‬ଵ ǡ ݀ଵ ǡ ‫ݎ‬ଵ ൐ǡ ൏ ‫ݏ‬ଶ ǡ ݀ଶ ǡ ‫ݎ‬ଶ ൐ǡ ǥ ሽ.
Output: a set of paths for all sessions and corresponding
number of routing rule entry
/* Initialization*/
1. Construct the set of clone ants ‫ ݐ݁ܵݐ݊ܣܥ‬ൌ
ሼ‫ܣܥ‬ଵ ǡ ‫ܣܥ‬ଶ ǡ ǥ ǡ ‫ܣܥ‬௠ ሽ , where
represents<‫ݏ‬ଵ ǡ ݀ଵ ǡ ‫ݎ‬ଵ >
2. Deposit global pheromone and ‫ ܭ‬kinds of local
pheromones on all the links. Their initial value is set
(10)
/* Iterative loop*/
3. Place all the clone ants of ‫ ݐ݁ܵݐ݊ܣܥ‬on the
corresponding source locations, such as ‫ܣܥ‬ଵ is put
on ‫ݏ‬ଵ , ‫ܣܥ‬ଶ is on ‫ݏ‬ଶ . Define the set of working ants
ܹ‫ ݏݐ݊ܣ݇ݎ݋‬ൌ ‫ ݐ݁ܵݐ݊ܣܥ‬, Initialize the path set
‫ ݐ݄݁ܵݐܽ݌‬ൌ ܷܰ‫ܮܮ‬
4. For each ant ‫ ݏݐ݊ܣ݇ݎ݋ܹ א ܣܥ‬, call Function
StepNext(CA)
5. If an ant (assume ‫ܣܥ‬௜ ‫ ) ݏݐ݊ܣ݇ݎ݋ܹ א‬finds its
destination ݀௜ , then WorkAnts = WorkAnts -{CAi},
PathSet=PathSet‫ <{׫‬CAi.path , CAi.B >}
6. If ܹ‫ ݏݐ݊ܣ݇ݎ݋‬is not empty, jump Step 4,
otherwise , jump Step 7
7. Calculate the number of routing rule. Update local
pheromones according to Eq. (7) and global
pheromones according to Eq. (9).
8. If the maximal generations meets, jump Step 9,
otherwise jump Step 3.
9. Print the number of routing rule , and‫ݐ݄݁ܵݐܽ݌‬
2) Procedure StepNext
Function StepNext (CA) // CA denotes an clone ant
(11) 1. Compute candidate link set of CA
set according to Eq. (11)
3. If the available bandwidth can’t satisfy the ant
Then
4. Perform cloning process for CA, then we obtain
CA1 and CA2
5. Add new ant into WorkAnts
6. Else
7. save the node ant passed;
8. End If
9. decrease the available rule space of the node
10. decrease the available bandwidth of link
V. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
In this section, we generate several random network
topologies according to reference [13], which is almost closed
to the real network. Our CACO-RSP is written with C++ in
VS2013, and run on the machine equipped with Intel Core i7
4-Core processors and 8GB RAM. And all simulation results
are averaged over 100 instances. In the following section we
would make a comparison with KSP algorithm proposed in
[14] and WID/LEN algorithm proposed in [5].
We first investigate the routing rule space occupation
under different number of sessions in a network with 400
nodes. And the parameters about link capacity and traffic
demand are randomly generated according to uniform
distributions respectively. As shown in Fig. 2, routing rule
space occupation increases linearly as the number of sessions
grows under all schemes. That is because more paths are
‫ܣܥ‬ଵ employed to achieve the QoS requirement, leading to more
rule space occupation. Moreover, the performance gap
between them becomes larger as the number of sessions
increases. Because KSP takes advantage of multiple shortest
110
path to transmit traffic㸪it only consider the length of the path,
but ignores the width of the path which is a key factor
influence the total nodes that carry the paths. WID/LEN take
both the length and width of the paths into account and
chooses the path with the largest width–length ratio, so it
performs better than KSP. It is easy to see that CACO-RSP
consumes the least routing rule space, because it not only
considers width–length ratio through heuristic information but
also the schedule flows from the entire topology.

Fig. 4. Variation of routing rule consumption with bandwidth demand

In Fig. 4, we then investigate the routing rule space

Fig. 2. Variation of routing rule consumption with session number
occupation with bandwidth demand in the network with 400
nodes, and the number of sessions is 80. Other settings are
same as Fig.1. The x-axis represents the normalized
bandwidth demand from s to t, i.e., the bandwidth demand
upper bound divided by the value of the network link
bandwidth upper bound in the network. As can be seen from
the figure, with the increasing bandwidth demand, all
algorithms consume more number of rules. This is because
the network flow must be routed to more paths under link
capacity bound as the bandwidth demand increases.
Moreover, the performance gap between CACO-RSP and the
other two algorithms becomes larger as the bandwidth
demand increases. In addition, the growth of CACO-RSP is
relatively flat indicating that it always find a stable solution
close to optimal one.

Fig. 3. Variation of routing rule consumption with nodes number

In Fig. 3, we then investigate the routing rule space

occupation with different network size. The parameters of
network are same as Fig.2, and the number of sesssions is
proporational to network nodes which randomly generated
according to uniform distributions within 15%-20%. The
number of rules increases with the network topology, because Fig. 5. Only local pheromone and without global pheromone
corresponding number of sessions increase and occupy more
paths to forward flows. CACO-RSP algorithm is always better
than the other two algorithms, and has a relatively slow
growth rate. This shows that our algorithm can be adapted to
different size of the network topology.

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Fig. 6. Only global pheromone and without local pheromone
In Fig.5 and Fig. 6, we verify the impact of local and
global pheromone of ant algorithm, CACO-Loc has only
local pheromone without global pheromone and CACO-Glo
only has global pheromone without local pheromone. The
network setting is same as Fig.2. As can be seen from the
figure, CACO-RSP performs better than both of them.
Because a local pheromone guide the ant towards individual
optimal solution, while a global pheromone towards global
optimal solution. CACO-Loc tend to find their own local
optimal solution while ignore the cooperation between the
ants. CACO-Glo guide their behaviors by only global
pheromone ignoring the impact of individual behavior on the
global solution.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we investigated the routing rule space
optimization problem for a set of sessions under QoS
guarantees, and formulate it using mixed integer
programming. To solve it, we proposed CACO-RSP heuristic
algorithm based on clone ant by exploiting the ant colony
optimization technique. The important capability of the
CACO-RSP algorithm is that it considers both the local and
global pheromone trail to guide the searching. The simulation
results show that the proposed algorithm successfully reduces
routing rule consumption.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The study is supported by theNatural Science Foundation
of Shandong Province (Grant No. ZR2015FM008, No.
BS2015DX003),the Science andTechnology Development
Program of Jinan (Grant No. 201303010), and the
Fundamental ResearchFunds of Shandong University (Grant
No. 2014JC037).
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