Multihoming, the connection of a stub network through multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to the Internet, has broadly
been employed by enterprise networks as a sort of redundancy technique to augment the availability and reliability of their
Internet access. Recently, with the emergence of Intelligent Route Control (IRC) products, IRC-capable multihomed networks
dynamically select which ISPs’ link to use for different destinations in their traffic in a smart way to bypass congested
or long paths as well as Internet outages. This dynamic traffic switch between upstream ISPs is mostly driven by regular measurement
of performance metrics such as delay, loss ratio, and available bandwidth of existing upstream paths. However, since IRC systems
are commercial products, details of their technical implementation are not available yet. Having the incentive to delve into
these systems deeply, in this paper, we employ traditional ant colony optimization (ACO) paradigm to study IRC systems in
that domain. Specifically, we are interested in two major questions. Firstly, how much effectively does an ant based IRC system
switch between upstream links in comparison to a commercial IRC system? Secondly, what are the realistic underlying performance
metrics by which ants pick the path to a food source (destination network) in a multihomed colony? Through extensive simulations
under different traffic load and link reliability scenarios, we observe that ants perform well in switching between available
egress links. Moreover, delay of paths is not the only criterion by which ants select the path; instead, through their intuitive
ACO paradigm, they tend to choose the path with a better performance in terms of both delay and loss ratio.
Keywords Intelligent route control - ant colony optimization