Optimized QoS priority routing for service tunability and overhead reduction using swarm based active network scheme

As technology is moving towards the pervasive computing environments with billions of users, devices, and services, the Quality of Service (QoS) becomes a necessity and an essential element for end-to-end real time applications. The concept of active network has been recently adopted in order to provide a framework in which executable code within data packets executes upon intermediate network nodes and to facilitate delay services in the network. This paper describes the combination of the active network concept with swarm based control method called Swarm-based Active Network scheme for optimized QoS priority routing. This hybrid scenario is using the bandwidth clustering approach in which packets are following the predetermined path allocated by swarm based packets (embedded swarms). This mechanism enables the adaptation of the system to new conditions, as well as additional information to be passed to neighboring nodes for which information is embodied in transmitted packets. The proposed swarm based scheme does not require message brokers to fulfill QoS demands issued by applications. Additionally, it computes efficiently the available resources that satisfy the QoS requirements of requests. Thorough examination is made for the performance and reliability of the Swarm based Active Network scheme for different traffic measures and for the corresponding QoS offered in terms of the end-to-end delay, available bandwidth and packet loss. This scheme offers a decentralized way to efficiently increase the overall network utilization, allowing scalability and efficient usage of network bandwidth. (C) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.