Abstract
Adaptive behaviour of swarm‐based agents (BT Technol. J. 1994; 12:104–113; AAMAS Conference '02, Melbourne, Australia, Month 1–2, 2002; Softcomput. J. 2001; 5(4):313–317.) is being studied in this paper with respect to network throughput for a certain amount of data traffic. Algorithmically complex problems like routing data packets in a network need to be faced with a dynamically adaptive approach such as agent‐based scheme. Particularly in interconnected networks where multiple networks are participating in order to figure a large‐scale network with different QoS levels and heterogeneity in the service of delay sensitive packets, routing algorithm must adopt in frequent network changes to anticipate such situations. Split agent‐based routing technique (SART) is a variant of swarm‐based routing (Adapt. Behav. 1997; 5:169–207; Proceedings of 2003 International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems—SPECTS, Montreal, Canada, July 20–24, 2003; 240–247.) where agents are split after their departure to the next node on a hop‐by‐hop basis. Packets that are delay sensitive are marked as prioritized which agents recognize‐as being a part of a packet‐ and try to influence the two‐way routing tables. Thorough examination is made, for the performance of the proposed algorithm in the network and the QoS offered, taking into account a number of metrics. It is shown that the split agent routing scheme applied to interconnected networks offers a decentralized control in the network and an efficient way to increase overall performance and packet control reducing at the same time the packet loss concept. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.