Abstraction and constraint satisfaction techniques for planning bandwidth allocation

Communication networks are expected to offer a wide range of services to an increasingly large number of users, with a diverse range of quality of service. This calls for efficient control and management of these networks. We address the problem of quality-of-service routing, more specifically the planning of bandwidth allocation to communication demands. Shortest-path routing is the traditional technique applied to this problem. However, this can lead to poor network utilization and even congestion. We show how an abstraction technique combined with systematic search algorithms and heuristics derived from artificial intelligence make it possible to solve this problem more efficiently and in much tighter networks, in terms of bandwidth usage.