Maximizing open capacity in mobile optical backbone networks using controllable mobile agents

We consider a mobile backbone network with free space optical point-to-point links. Requests for aggregate bandwidth between pairs of backbone nodes arrive one-by-one, and a bandwidth guaranteed connection is established if there are sufficient network resources; otherwise, the request is rejected. In addition to the ordinary backbone nodes, there are a limited number of controllable mobile agents; these are nodes that may be located as desired to optimize the performance of the network. The specific problem we consider is that of determining the positions for the mobile agents to maximize the minimum max How over all source-destination pairs. We show that this problem is NP-hard. We then develop a heuristic algorithm to locate the agents based on the current network state. It is shown that by using the algorithm to strategically place a limited number of agents, a significant improvement in network performance can be achieved.