New measure and experimental evaluation for multiagent-based reservation of backup virtual paths in ATM networks

In order to make the ATM network fault-tolerant and the network service flexible, a method for setting up backup virtual paths (VPs for short) using multiagents is effective with respect to adaptability to the change of network resource and user requirements, examples of which are failure of nodes and links and addition of VPs, respectively. In the method, under the assumption that candidates of backup VPs between different pairs of source and destination nodes are given, the optimum backup VPs are obtained by exchanging information among agents autonomously. First, this paper proposes a new measure for determining backup VPs between different pairs of source and destination nodes. The measure shows a degree of fault-tolerance for backup VPs and addition of VPs. Next, this paper presents simulation results to evaluate the adaptability of the method. The results show that the method efficiently obtains the optimum backup VPs even when the number of backup VPs increases and that different idle time at each destination node enables to shorten the total processing time while keeping complete detection of shared links