Using Analytic Hierarchy Process to improve the decision process of routing protocols

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) offers a mathematic theory and a methodology for decision processes [1]. AHP can be used to analyze and solve structured problems. AHP can be applied for multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) processes. A lot of applications were already been found for AHP, in business, transportation, health, gaming, mobile telecommunications and other activity sectors [2], [3]. Practitioners and software developers can use AHP to implement automatic decision processes. Hence we intend to apply AHP on the networking field, on Wide Area Networks (WANs), where routers have to choose the best path for packet transfer from the source node to the destination node. Different metrics are used by the routing protocols to analyze the network graph (hops number, bandwidth, delay etc.) but usually the decision is made based only on one criterion no matter how the transmission conditions change. AHP is more flexible and it leads to the best decision combining criteria and to an improved quality-of-service. The goal of this paper is to apply AHP for a better routing multi-criteria decision process. Voice service is used to exemplify how AHP can be applied to improve routing decision and protocols.