The internet is an essential part of our life. The current pandemic showed us how much we rely on this technology. Many had to resort to online alternatives, thus putting a strain on the network, prompting European governments to ask companies such as YouTube and Netflix to lower their video streaming quality in an effort to reduce the load.

One of the main inefficiencies faced by today’s networks is the way packets are routed over the network. If we replace data packets with cars, and network cables with roads, the problem network routers try to solve becomes equivalent to: “Which route should each car take to arrive to its destination having travelled the least distance and spent the least amount of time commuting?”

One simple solution would be to route everyone over the shortest route (as is currently being done); however, this route is likely to become congested, with users of such route experiencing an increase in their commute time. Finding the optimal solution that makes the best use of the road infrastructure while keeping the users’ commute time to a minimum is non-trivial. In fact, no algorithm that finds a solution to this problem in a reasonable amount of time exists as yet. This is where we use the power and elegance of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) to find an approximate solution to such a difficult problem.

EAs are inspired by nature’s evolutionary process where the better a solution is, the higher the chance that this solution survives and reproduces. During the evolutionary process, solutions are mated together with the hope of creating better solutions than what we have in the current pool of solutions. Iterate this process a number of times, and you have a powerful optimisation algorithm that has been used during my research to develop a routing algorithm that increases the efficiency of computer networks. The routing algorithm developed during my PhD found solutions that allocates 22 per cent more network throughput than a standard routing algorithm.

The research work described in this article was partially funded by the ENDEAVOUR Scholarships Scheme (Group B). This research has been carried out using computational facilities procured through the European Regional Development Fund, Project ERDF-076 ‘Refurbishing the Signal Processing Laboratory within the Department of CCE’, University of Malta.

Noel Farrugia, PhD graduate from the University of Malta with a keen interest on everything tech-related.

Did you know?

• Thanks to a chemical stored in its genitals, the male Heliconius melpomene butterfly makes females smell so bad after sex they ‘turn off’ rival mates.

• The ‘S.’ in Harry S. Truman stands for ‘S’.  Truman said the initial was a compromise between the names of his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young.

• There are over eight million beetle specimens in London’s Natural History Museum. Many of them are yet to be properly identified by scientists.

• Not all special effects are high tech ‒ some of the asteroids in The Empire Strikes Back are potatoes, and one of the ships in Return of the Jedi is a gym shoe.

• Only 5% of Americans believe they are less intelligent than average.

For more trivia, visit www.um.edu.mt/think.

Sound bites

• As the number of people who have fought off SARS-CoV-2 climbs ever higher, a critical question has grown in importance: how long will their immunity to the novel coronavirus last? A new Rockefeller study offers an encouraging answer, suggesting that those who recover from COVID-19 are protected against the virus for at least six months, and likely much longer.  The findings, published in Nature, provide the strongest evidence yet that the immune system “remembers” the virus and, remarkably, continues to improve the quality of antibodies even after the infection has waned. Antibodies produced months after the infection showed increased ability to block SARS-CoV-2, as well as its mutated versions such as the South African variant.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210121131909.htm

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