An approach to Network Control and resource management based on intelligent agents

摘要

Network Control is currently carried out mainly by means of signalling protocols. Although these protocols are robust and facilitate standardisation, they present several drawbacks such as the inability of the Service Providers to adapt network resource control to the particular needs of their services, or the difficulty in deploying advanced traffic control schemes in order to achieve increased utilisation. An open distributed software architecture for Network Control based on concepts such as Intelligent Agents can provide a solution to this problem. This paper highlights the major issues of this problem and presents the architecture and implementation of a system that enables open and flexible network control and resource management using intelligent agents. The description of the architecture is complemented by experimental results as well as a generic implementation framework for deploying open programmable control capabilities in existing networks.