  Significant research has been carried out recently to find the optimal path
in network routing. Among them, the evolutionary algorithm approach is an area
where work is carried out extensively. We in this paper have used particle
swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) for finding the optimal
path and the concept of region based network is introduced along with the use
of indirect encoding. We demonstrate the advantage of fitness value and hop
count in both PSO and GA. A comparative study of PSO and genetic algorithm (GA)
is carried out, and it was found that PSO converged to arrive at the optimal
path much faster than GA.
