A Multi Agent System Approach for Self Resource Regulation in IP Networks

As Internet is becoming the global infrastructure for all media communications, ensuring the reliability and the quality of network services is far from being a secondary task. Indeed, many business activities rely on the network and any performance degradation can result in serious financial losses. The main objective of Internet Service Providers is to maintain permanently an acceptable service delivery for their subscribers and respect scrupulously the Service Level Agreements. To achieve this goal, just committing bandwidth resources is not sufficient since network services are not safe from breakdowns. The dysfunction of some of its elements or persistent overloads generated by bursts traffics can induce serious deterioration of the network performance and impact the end users’ applications. Continuous service monitoring is then required and an autonomous network resource regulation mechanism is necessary in such situation to avoid the degradation and the collapse of all the applications sharing the impacted resource. In this paper, we propose a decentralized approach for the monitoring and management of the network backbone shared resource by the mean of distributed autonomous agents. The agents are deployed at the edge routers and cooperate together in order to maintain a global acceptable level of service in critical situations where the current quality of service is less than the expected one. This allows self adaptive service and resource management with an interesting abstraction from network backbone heterogeneity and complexity.