Improved Expert System Support for Hybrid-Ethernet Configuration Design

The objective of this research is to suggest a practical solution to the implementation of a Hybrid-Ethernet. Particular emphasis is given to an Expert System Support for the Hybrid-Ethernet Configuration design. The Hybrid-Ethernet is implemented by adding additional channels (data links) to the conventional Ethernet. This is done to overcome the shortcomings of a typical Ethernet: lack of guaranteed private and secure communication, difficulty in establishing interactive communication, difficulty in upgrading the performance to accommodate increased system load, etc. An Expert system support for Hybrid-Ethernet configuration design was recently introduced [1]. The expert system support was designed to decide where to insert the additional data-links so as to meet the various requirements such as User requirement (private & interactive communication), network requirement (traffic load), and connection cost. The expert system support proposed in [1] would result in ad-hoc network topology structures, and the number of user requests satisfied is limited. Also, the decision in [1] was based on factors like traffic load, network requirements, network capabilities, user requirements, etc., with most of them taken independently, which will give rise to many contentions that will make the actual implementation on a real time system very difficult. In this paper, the improved expert system support is developed with a Pseudo-Tree-Ethernet configuration. The idea is to add the advantages of a Point-to-Point network to an Ethernet system by grouping the nodes desiring an additional data link channel into a tree-like structure, based on certain criteria [10]. This will enable us to make the network more flexible to incorporate increased load as well as to include even those nodes which did not have actual network or user requirements but may at some time wish to communicate. The decision in our expert system is made by combining the network requirement and the user requirement, and then considering the network connection requirements separately. The aim of this paper is to resolve the conflicts that arise by using the suggestions in [1], and to present the idea of a Pseudo-Tree-Ethernet in coming up with the most desirable network configuration instead of the ad-hoc configuration proposed in [1]. A LAN based on this architecture can be installed in the form of an Ethernet and may be upgraded and tuned to its application environment by the insertion of node-to-node data links based on network characteristics as provided by the user. The factors and variables introduced in [1] have been retained for their comprehensive simplicity and the rules for the improved expert system habe [sic] been developed using those variables. A comparison of results is included in this document to support the claim of the author