by Verdi, Fábio L.; Magalhães, Maurício F.; Cardozo, Eleri; Madeira, Edmundo R. M.; Welin, Annikki

This work presents a service-oriented architecture for interdomain service provisioning in optical networks. The architecture introduces a service layer that concentrates all the interactions among domains necessary for service provisioning. A service layer is an alternative to the GMPLS (Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching) architecture, but without a rigid control plane as found in GMPLS. We start by defining a set of basic services to provide single end-to-end (e2e) interdomain connections. Then, more sophisticated services are created through the composition of these basic services. The interdomain Optical VPN (Virtual Private Network) service is considered in order to illustrate the composition of services. A prototype of the architecture was designed and implemented using Web services as the main technology. The architecture was evaluated in terms of speed, scalability, and bandwidth consumption necessary to establish e2e interdomain connections and Optical VPNs.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-007-9060-2
Online Date: 2/27/2007
Print publication date: 6/1/2007
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by Chiang, Frank; Braun, Robin; Agbinya, Johnson I.

This paper proposes a self-organizing scheme based on ant metaheuristics to optimize the operation of multiple classes of managed elements on an Operations Support Systems (OSSs) for mobile pervasive communications. Ant metaheuristics are characterized by learning and adaptation capabilities against dynamic environment changes and uncertainties. As an important division of swarm agent intelligence, it distinguishes itself from centralized management schemes due to its features of robustness and scalability. We have successfully applied ant metaheuristics to the network service configuration process, which is simply redefined as: the managed elements represented as graphic nodes, and ants traverse by selecting nodes with the minimum cost constraints until the eligible network elements are located along near-optimal paths—the located elements are those needed for the configuration or activation of a particular product and service. Although the configuration process is non-transparent to end users, the negotiated SLAs between users and providers affect the overall process. This proposed self-organized learning and adaptation scheme using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is evaluated by simulation in Java. A performance comparison is also made with a class of Genetic Algorithm known as PBIL. Finally, the simulation results show the scalability and robustness capability of autonomous ant-like agents able to adapt to dynamic networks.

DOI: 10.1007/s10922-006-9056-3
Online Date: 2/14/2007
Print publication date: 3/1/2007
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