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Distributed soft policy enforcement by swarm intelligence; application to loadsharing and protection

Mise en œuvre de règles par intelligence collective flexible et répartie; application au partage de charge et à la protection

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Abstract

Managing complex heterogeneous computer and telecommunication systems is challenging. One promising management concept for such systems is policy based management. However, it is common to interpret policies strictly and resort to centralized decisions to resolve policy conflicts. Centralization is undesirable from a dependability point of view. Swarm intelligence based on sets of autonomous “ant-like” mobile agents, where control is distribute among the agents, has been applied to several challenging optimization and tradeoff problems with great success. This paper introduces and demonstrates how a set of such ant-like mobile agents can be designed to find near optimal solutions for the implementation of a set of potentially conflicting policies. Solutions are found in a truly distributed manner, hence an overall more dependable/robust system is obtained. The enforcement of the policies is soft in the sense that it is probabilistic and yields a kind of “best effort” implementation. To demonstrate the feasibility of the overall concept, a case study is presented where ant-like mobile agents are designed to implement load distribution and conflict free back-up policies.

Résumé

Gérer des systèmes complexes et hétérogènes est un véritable défi auquel tente de répondre la gestion par règles. Il est courant d’interpréter strictement les règles et de s’en remettre à un système de décision centralisé pour résoudre les conflits. Mais cette centralisation n’est pas toujours désirable. Pour résoudre certains problèmes difficiles d’optimisation on a été amené à utiliser une forme d’intelligence collective répartie entre des agents mobiles autonomes. Cet article montre la façon dont on peut utiliser un tel ensemble d’agents pour implémenter une des règles éventuellement conflictuelles. Les solutions étant trouvées de façon réellement distribuée, il en résulte un système plus robuste. La mise en œuvre des règles est flexible au sens où elle est probabiliste et conduit à une implémentation du type «au mieux» (best effort). Pour démontrer la faisabilité de ce type d’approche, on présente une étude de cas dans laquelle les agents mobiles sont conçus pour traiter les politiques de distribution de charge et de protection.

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  1. Centre for Quantifiable Quality of Service in Communication Systems (Q2S), Centre of Excellence, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, N-7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Otto Wittner & Bjarne E. Helvik

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  1. Otto Wittner
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  2. Bjarne E. Helvik
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Correspondence to Otto Wittner.

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Wittner, O., Helvik, B.E. Distributed soft policy enforcement by swarm intelligence; application to loadsharing and protection. Ann. Télécommun. 59, 10–24 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03179671

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