Mobile Agents in Telecommunications Networks -A Simulative Approach to Load Balancing

摘要

Networks today are growing continuously complex, with new kinds of services being included and heterogeneous networks interworking as a whole. Telecommunications networks in particular have become truly global networks, consisting of a variety of national and regional networks, both wired and wireless. Consequently, the management of telecommunications networks is becoming an increasingly complex task, as size and complexity constitute critical requirements that have to be met. Decentralized approaches to network management are currently being discussed, as is has become evident that central solutions cannot cope with scalability issues. Mobile agent technology in particular is being examined as a new distributed system and network paradigm. One vital issue in telecommunications networks management is load balancing, as it allows to efficiently use the network to capacity and avoid overload situations. In this paper, we will examine swarming intelligence of mobile agents as a basis for the development of a decentralized load balancing mechanism in telecommunications networks. Various strategies for swarming intelligence will be evaluated and compared to conventional approaches with a simulative approach.