Intelligent agents for network management
C. Frei · 1997
Introduction In packet-switched networks, routing can be solved efficiently by local algorithms. This is however not the case in circuit-switched networks, such as ATM, where an information flow cannot be split between several different routes: one and only one circuit can be allocated for a transmission, and resources must be reserved along the chosen route. In the latter case, routing has been shown to be NP-complete ([5]). Many potential applications such as multimedia transmissions or videoconferences require a quality of service guarantee which can only be given in circuit-switched networks, so this problem is becoming important in practice. A communication network is a set of nodes that are interconnected by links to permit the exchange of information. We model it as a network graph (see Figure 1d). A need to exchange information between two nodes is called a demand. Each demand requires a certain quality of service (QoS) w