Active Organisations for Routing

Communications networks require increasingly complex resource management to stay up and running. This is particularly true in networks which aim to provide some guaranteed quality of service (either explicitly as in ATM and other connection-oriented architectures or implicitly as in a smoothly running IP network). The resulting increased complexity of routing procedures needs to be handled in a coordinated and exible manner. This control could well be provided by customisable control programs in the network which rely on the computational capabilities provided by active nodes. Not only will control programs need to act independently and autonomously but they will also need to coordinate their actions with each other to ensure that decisions in the network are taken in a coordinated and consistent manner. This paper presents a framework for organising groups of control programs for routing tasks in a network. The organisation is able to adapt its own structure over time as the state of the network changes.