Backpressure (BP) routing and its shortest-path biased variant (SP-BP) provide powerful congestion-aware multipath resource allocation for wireless multi-hop networks, but they rely on per-commodity queueing and slot-by-slot control that may be difficult to realize under practical or legacy forwarding architectures. Moreover, even state-of-the-art SP-BP still suffers from the last-packet problem when short-lived traffic coexists with streaming flows. To address these limitations, we propose Ant Backpressure (Ant-BP), a periodic and fully distributed routing scheme that decouples route learning from packet forwarding. Ant-BP uses virtual SP-BP to construct pheromone-based forwarding probabilities, while actual packets are forwarded through per-neighbor first-in-first-out (FIFO) queues with probabilistic next-hop selection. This architecture enables link-capacity sharing across commodities, mitigates starvation of short-lived traffic, and extends the benefits of SP-BP to network architectures based on per-neighbor FIFO forwarding. Through periodic virtual updates, Ant-BP also adapts to transient link failures and mobility-induced topology changes. Our theoretical analysis and simulations show that, compared with conventional ant colony optimization (ACO) routing, virtual SP-BP enables Ant-BP to establish higher-quality forwarding policies with lower overhead. As a result, Ant-BP improves latency and delivery ratio over SP-BP and ACO-based baselines under mixed streaming and bursty traffic, achieves throughput comparable to SP-BP at low and medium traffic load, and remains robust to mismatched virtual-traffic assumptions, transient link failures, and node mobility.

翻译：反压（BP）路由及其最短路径偏置变体（SP-BP）为无线多跳网络提供了强大的拥塞感知多径资源分配能力，但它们依赖于每业务队列和逐时隙控制，这在实际或传统转发架构下可能难以实现。此外，即使是最先进的SP-BP，在短寿命流量与流式流量共存时仍面临最后一个数据包问题。为解决这些限制，我们提出了一种周期性、完全分布式的路由方案——蚁群反压（Ant-BP），它将路由学习与数据包转发解耦。Ant-BP使用虚拟SP-BP构建基于信息素的转发概率，而实际数据包则通过每个邻居的先入先出（FIFO）队列进行概率性下一跳选择。这种架构实现了跨业务共享链路容量，缓解了短寿命流量的饥饿问题，并将SP-BP的优势扩展到基于每邻居FIFO转发的网络架构。通过周期性虚拟更新，Ant-BP还能适应瞬时链路故障和移动性导致的拓扑变化。我们的理论分析和仿真表明，与传统蚁群优化（ACO）路由相比，虚拟SP-BP使Ant-BP能够以更低开销建立更高质量的转发策略。因此，在混合流式与突发流量下，Ant-BP较SP-BP和基于ACO的基线方案提升了时延与投递率，在中低流量负载下实现了与SP-BP相当的吞吐量，并且对虚拟流量假设不匹配、瞬时链路故障和节点移动性保持鲁棒性。