Bandwidth adaptive hierarchies for on-line ATM quality of service routing

On-line QoS routing in ATM networks involves challenging problems in the distribution of information and control. This paper presents a hierarchical routing architecture which adapts its own structure over time to match available bandwidth in the network. The adaptive hierarchy is shown to significantly outperform a similar static hierarchy in preliminary tests and comparisons with centralised and hop-by-hop routing approaches are also encouraging. The paper also discusses the relevance of matching the information model to the network state for standard (PNNI) hierarchical routing architectures.