A Dynamic Hierarchy of Intelligent Agents for Network Management

Routing as well as the management of communication networks that support hybrid types of communications requiring quality of service is a hard problem. We present here a framework1 that decomposes the network into a hierarchy of abstract views of the network that summarizes the available bandwidth resources and highlights bottlenecks in the network in order to reduce the complexity of the previously mentioned tasks. This framework can easily be distributed to a hierarchy of intelligent agents. This framework is technology independent and can be applied to any connection-oriented communication network.