1. Ant-link Agents for Load Balancing in Telecommunications Networks
Nathan Lindle
Xiaofeng Tao
Based on the paper
by Ruud Schoonderwoerd, Owen Holland, and Janet Bruten

2. The Problem
Congested network is causing dropped calls and disconnects.
Surges in demand from certain areas makes the location of congestion unpredictable.

3. Load Balancing
Large telecommunications networks require distribution of calls across all nodes for improved efficiency
Two general categories
- Pre-specified routing
- Dynamic routing

4. Appleby/Steward Agents
Original Mobile Agent System
Load management agents launch from a source node and report the best route from every node to the source node
Parent agents measure network congestion and distribute load management agents accordingly

5. Maybe Ants Could do Better
The system is expensive and is based mostly in AI and heuristics
An ant system needs to simulate the pheromones that ants drop without using too many system resources.
They can alter the routing tables of each node based on the age of the ants.

6. Probabilistic Decision Making
The routing tables are altered with the formula
Then the entries are normalized by taking
5% noise model added

7. Finding the Shortest Paths
Using this system, a simulation was run to test if the ants could find the shortest path for a given network.

8. Adding Congestion
Increasing the ants age was found to be the best way to take congestion into account.
Keeping the ants at one site has another subtle effect

9. Improved Appleby/Steward
Eliminating circular routes by updating routes only in the direction of the source node and having each node contain at most one agent
Eliminating excessively long routes by creating a bias for shorter routes

10. Simulation
Each node is issued a demand weight from .01 to .07 which is then normalized (simulates random call distribution)
Each node has a call capacity of 40 calls
Links between nodes have unlimited capacity

11. Experiment
The system was tested first without changing the distributions

12. Experiment Cont.
They then tested the system with changing distributions.

13. Conclusion
The paper concludes by saying that further study is being conducted to find out if this system will work with an actual network and how it deals with failure.
Questions?