Self-Aware Networks And Quality Of Service

We show how solf-awareness , through on-line self-monitoring and measurement, coupled with intelligent adaptive behaviour in response to observed data, can be used to offer quality of service to network users. We first describe the general principles which govern our design, and briefly describe the experimental packet network system we have built in which users are allowed to specify their QoS objectives. The network uses on-line adaptive traffic routing to try to meet the users\u27 QoS requests. Cognitive or smart packets are used for self-observation, and reinforcement learning with neural networks is implemented at network nodes to seek new paths and deduce improved paths from existing routes. First we show how the network is able to discover routes, beginning with an empty state and starting from a random search. Secondly we show how our network can intelligently direct traffic through the Internet to optimize web traffic for a user by offering the best quality of service through different Internet Service Providers. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003