Intelligent Agents for ATM Network Control and Resource Management: Experiences and Results from an Implementation on a Network Testbed

Abstract

This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a distributed multi-agent system designed to provide flexible control and efficient resource management of a communications network. The system architecture enables different service providers and the network provider to use different control algorithms on the same logically partitioned physical infrastructure. All the mechanisms have been implemented and successfully tested on real experimental telecommunications networks. The system components are first described and then results from experiments and performance issues are discussed. The problem of interfacing a multi-agent system to network devices is then discussed. Interfacing agents with the network requires some form of programmable interface, since it is necessary, for example, to override conventional ATM signaling. At the moment programmable network device interfaces are not always available, particularly in commercially available devices and, thus, generic operations using management protocols have to be used. A generic architecture for embedding custom network control functionality into ATM networks is described.