Title: Techniques for Network Management and Planning

Abstract:
The fundamental issue of quality of service routing in integrated services networks has triggered a lot of research during the last years. However, the proposed algorithms attempt to route communication demands only on a call by call basis, without taking into account future traffic. There are nonetheless cases where the traffic profile is known. In this talk, I address this related problem to quality-of-service routing, the off-line planning of bandwidth allocation to demands known in advance. Shortest path routing is the traditional technique applied to this problem. However, this can lead to poor network utilization and even congestion. I will show how an abstraction technique combined with systematic search algorithms and heuristics derived from Artificial Intelligence make it possible to solve this problem more efficiently and in much tighter networks, in terms of bandwidth usage. In some cases, the abstraction technique also allows to prove during search that some allocation problems are indeed infeasible, without having to explore the whole search space. The regions between which bandwidth must be added are then identified.

Several articles and my PhD dissertation can be found here

Biography:
Christian Frei is a technology officer and founder of Iconomic Systems S.A. (Switzerland). He earned a diploma in Computer Science Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne in 1994. After 5 years as a research assistant at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the same university, he obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2000. He has developed abstraction techniques for constraint satisfaction, in particular for applications in communication networks. His research interests are in constraint statisfaction, abstraction, graph theory, and algorithmics, as well as applications in engineering and e-commerce.