ATM flow control schemes through a multi-agent system

High-speed communication networks are expected soon. They should provide support for transmission of a large area of applications. To support these integrated services, high-speed networks are absolutely necessary. The ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) technique seems suitable to take in charge all the constraints. However, a large number of problems have to be dealt with. In particular, flow control schemes to be applied and congestion control methods should be well adapted to the resources of the network. Moreover, flow control decisions have to be performed in a distributed manner. This leads to a very difficult problem: how to manage the flow control and congestion control parameters? In this paper a new flow control scheme is proposed based on a distributed algorithm. Due to the complexity of the problem, a multi-agent system is proposed, using Distributed Artificial Intelligence concepts, to control the parameters inside the network.