Subsumption and survivability in bidding for bandwidth

Abstract

Cooperative agents provide layers of competence to control a telecom network. Higher planning layers coordinate lower layers by seeking to globally optimise the survivability of the network. It is shown that the process of finding the best flow in the network can be viewed as a distributed auction where the prices are obtained from the derivatives of the survivability function. In the application, a simple measure of survivability maps into familiar routing heuristics.