Self-tuned refresh rate in a swarm intelligence path management system

  • Authors:

  • Poul E. Heegaard;Otto J. Wittner

  • Affiliations:

  • Telenor R&D and Department of Telematics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway;Centre for Quantifiable Quality of Service in Communication Systems, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

  • Venue:
  • IWSOS'06/EuroNGI'06 Proceedings of the First international conference, and Proceedings of the Third international conference on New Trends in Network Architectures and Services conference on Self-Organising Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

CE-ants (Cross Entropy ants) is a distributed, robust and adaptive swarm intelligence system for dealing with path management in communication networks. This paper focuses on strategies for adjusting the overhead generated by the CE-ants as the state of the network changes. The overhead is in terms of number of management packets (ants) generated, and the adjustments are done by controlling the generation rate of ants traversing the network. The self-tuned strategies proposed in this paper detect state changes implicitly by monitoring parameters and ant rates in the management system. Rate adaptation is done both in the network nodes and in the peering points of the virtual paths. The results are promising, and compared to fixed rate strategies the self-tuned strategies show a significant saving (70-85%) in number of packets, and has similar (even slightly better) data packet delay and service availability. The rate adaptation in network nodes provides fast restoration with short path detection times and hence also high service availability. The implicit self-tuned ant rate in the path endpoints improves the convergence time on link state events without flooding the network with management packets in steady state when these are not required.