Due to the strong time-varying nature of the ultraviolet communication network channel, corresponding adaptive routing is needed to solve the problems of high network transmission delay and uneven energy consumption of nodes dhring the net-working process. Based on ant colony optimization(ACO) algorithm, an improved ACO algorithm for ultraviolet commmnication networks is proposed. The algorithm introduces the network node energy into the state transition probability formula of ACO algorithm, and analyzes the delay performance of the algorithm under different transmitting angles, transmitting power and data transmission rates by Matlab simulation software. The simmlation results show that compared with the ACO algorithm, when the transmit-receive elevation is 50o, the delay of the proposed algorithm is reduced by 1 s, the convergence speed is increased by 28%, the average residual energy of the convergence path is also significantly increased, and the life cycle of the network is effectively extended.