A cognitive approach to self-configuration of communication protocols

Author(s)

Neumar Costa Malheiros

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Computação
• Defense date: 2013-05-16

Examining board members

Edmundo Roberto Mauro Madeira; Célio Vinicius Neves de Albuquerque; Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville; Islene Calciolari Garcia; Juliana Freitag Borin

• Advisor: Nelson Luis Saldanha da Fonseca; Edmundo Roberto Mauro Madeira

Abstract

As network technologies evolve, the complexity of managing communication infrastructures and protocols increases. Such complexity makes the management of current communication networks a major challenge. Traditional centralized solutions for network management are not scalable and are incapable of providing continuous reconfiguration of network protocols in response to time-varying conditions. In this work, we present a feasible and effective solution for self-configuration of communication protocols. We propose a cognitive approach for dynamic reconfiguration of protocol parameters in order to avoid performance degradation as a consequence of changing network conditions. The proposed cognitive framework, called CogProt, provides runtime adjustment of protocol parameters through learning and reasoning mechanisms. It periodically reconfigures the parameters of interest based on acquired knowledge to improve system-wide performance. The proposed approach is decentralized and can be applied to runtime adjustment of a wide range of protocol parameters at different layers of the protocol stack. We present a number of case studies to illustrate the application of the proposed approach. Both simulation and wide-area network experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to improve overall performance for different network scenarios and also to avoid performance degradation by timely reacting to network changes (AU)