AFRIQ: An Agent-Based Framework for Routing in Internetworks with Quality of Service Constraints

We propose a novel paradigm for address resolution, routing, and resource reservation between network domains in the presence of quality service requirements. Unlike tradiational schemes, the current paradigm does not attempt to agree upon what data is transferred between nodes (e.g., a topology abstraction scheme), but only on how data is accessed. Thus, the paradigm serves as a thin framework whifch glues together different routing schemes into an integrated object-oriented link-state network-control plane. This is done by having a routing database which contains not only remote domain's data but also agent code from the domain. The agent interprets the data based on the domain's proprietary considerations. As a result, the standards for network-control are minimized to a fairly genetic code-interfaces (APIs) instead of the very involved existing standards, thereby simplifying standardization processes, allowing for optimized interoperability between more diverse networks and achieving a future-proof architecture.