Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

Engineering self-managed adaptive networks

In order to meet the requirements of emerging services, the future Internet will need to be flexible, reactive and adaptive with respect to arising network conditions. Network management functionality is essential in providing dynamic reactiveness and adaptability but current management approaches have limitations which prevent them from meeting these requirements. In search for a paradigm shift, recent research efforts have been focusing on autonomic/self-management principles, whereby network elements can adapt themselves to contextual changes without any external intervention through adaptive and flexible functionality. This thesis investigates how autonomic principles can be extended and applied to fixed networks for quality of service and performance management. It presents a novel resource management framework which enables intelligence to be introduced within the network in order to support self-management functionality in a coordinated and controllable manner. The proposed framework relies on a distributed infrastructure, called the management substrate, which is a logical structure formed by the ingress nodes of the network. The role of the substrate is illustrated on realistic resource management application scenarios for the emerging self-managed Internet. These cover solutions for dynamic traffic engineering (load balancing across multiple paths), energy efficiency and cache management in Internet Service Providers. The thesis addresses important research challenges associated with the proposed framework, such as the design of specific organisational, communication and coordination models required to support the different management control loops. Furthermore, it develops, for each application scenario, specific mechanisms to realise the relevant resource management functionality. It also considers issues related to the coexistence of multiple control loops and investigates an approach by which their interactions can be managed. In order to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed resource management solution, an extensive performance evaluation of the different mechanisms described in this thesis have been performed based on realistic traffic traces and network topologies