Active Network Modelling and Simulation: A Behavioural Approach

Abstract

Network environments become more and more complex in terms of new services, quality of service to handle and user demand for increasing throughput. All these facts have to be performed in real time (or alm ost), and consequently, network management and control are difficult to realise in this continuously changing environment. The network is now unpredictable and there is areal lack in the modelisation and simulation tools to handle this dynamicity. In this context, agents and multi-agent systems seem to be good candidates to provide a way to model and to manage the network dynamicity. This is due to the fact that agents can perform tasks in an autonomous, distributed, adaptable and cooperative manner. Our goal here is to model an active network by using a multi-agent approach and more precisely a behaviour based agent approach. Instead ofrepresenting the actions ofthe network elements by complex algorithms, we rather describe them by their behaviours which are usually simple and familiar words, inspired in part from human behaviour. On this basis, we have made simulations of an active network environment, and implemented different combinations of four individual behaviours by using a multi-agent platform called Swarm. Results ofthese simulations are significant and show that we do not loose important packets (with priority) any more when we introduce a behaviour in the nodes.

Autonomous Network Equipments

“…The approach we propose is different [16], [17], [18], [19]. In fact, every node has one cognitive agent that supervises, monitors, and manages a set of reactive agents.…”

On Using Multi-agent Systems in End to End Adaptive Monitoring

“…CAREFUL (see [10] for a more detailed description) for example, a PRIOR queue MM, depends on the current queue load parameter. As we can see in figure 6, following the current queue load, the agent state changes causing a different response to a particular event.…”

“…This mechanism, detailed in [10,11,12] and consisting in monitoring two thresholds of the queue load and changing the actions concerning the incoming packets according to the current queue load, is able to guarantee a better treatment of these packets. By adopting PRIOR mechanism, the node begins to monitor a different parameter (in addition to those already monitored).…”