Pheromone routing protocol on a scale-free network

This paper proposes a routing strategy for network systems based on the local information of "pheromone." The overall traffic capacity of a network system can be evaluated by the critical packet generating rate Rc. Under this critical generating rate, the total packet number in the system first increases and then decreases to reach a balance state. The system behaves differently from that with a local routing strategy based on the node degree or shortest path routing strategy. Moreover, the pheromone routing strategy performs much better than the local routing strategy, which is demonstrated by a larger value of the critical generating rate. This protocol can be an alternation for superlarge networks, in which the global topology may not be available.