A fuzzy control approach for adaptive traffic routing

The application of fuzzy control to adaptive traffic routing in telephone networks is investigated. The authors use, on one hand, the properties of fuzzy control techniques and adaptive routing, on the other hand, to derive a routing system that is robust and efficient. They analyze the impact of various availability indicators on performance, which indicates that the choice of a suitable indicator must be made to characterize circuit group availability. When used in the fuzzy control framework the indicator used appears clearly to improve the performance of the routing algorithm as compared to existing routing systems. On the other hand, the use of this indicator in a classical way appears to be of poor utility. The study compares the performance of methods usually applied to adaptive traffic routing and the fuzzy control approach and shows that the fuzzy control approach could provide an effective framework for robust control of traffic routing in communications networks. Research studies still need to be carried out to develop fuzzy adaptive routing on different network structures and to evaluate its impact on performance