IconoNET: a tool for automated bandwidth allocation planning

Communication networks are expected to offer a wide range of services to an increasingly large number of users, with a diverse range of quality of service. This calls for efficient control and management of these networks. In this paper, we address the problem of quality-of-service routing, more specifically the planning of bandwidth allocation to communication demands. Shortest path routing is the traditional technique applied to this problem. However, this can lead to poor network utilization and even congestion. We show how an abstraction technique combined with systematic search algorithms and heuristics derived from Artificial Intelligence make it possible to solve this problem more efficiently and in much tighter networks, in terms of bandwidth usage

A Dynamic Hierarchy of Intelligent Agents for Network Management

Routing as well as the management of communication networks that support hybrid types of communications requiring quality of service is a very hard problem. We present here a framework 1 that decomposes the network into a hierarchy of abstract views of the network that summarizes the available bandwidth resources and highlights bottlenecks in the network in order to reduce the complexity of the previously mentioned tasks. This framework can easily be distributed to a hierarchy of intelligent agents. This framework is technology independent and can be applied to any circuit-switched communication network. Keywords: communication network, quality of service, routing, network management, network planning, abstractions. 1 Introduction Many applications, especially those related to multimedia, require that information is transmitted in a communication network with certain quality of service guarantees. Such guarantees can only be given in circuitswitched networks, such as ATM ( [ 6 ] ). ..

A Dynamic Hierarchy of Intelligent Agents for Network Management

Routing as well as the management of communication networks that support hybrid types of communications requiring quality of service is a hard problem. We present here a framework1 that decomposes the network into a hierarchy of abstract views of the network that summarizes the available bandwidth resources and highlights bottlenecks in the network in order to reduce the complexity of the previously mentioned tasks. This framework can easily be distributed to a hierarchy of intelligent agents. This framework is technology independent and can be applied to any connection-oriented communication network