Intelligent layer 2 switching by CE-ants

Abstract

Living in Information Society, we always want to improve the networks to get more reliability, more bit rate, less ping . CE ant Layer 2 systems appear in order to change the concept of usual centralized networks, where the control is centralized and paths are decided before to start the transmission (with the consequent impossibility of balance the load). Layer 2 networks provide fast forwarding of packets from one link to another, without checking IP direction and avoiding to use some error corrections (like in Layer 3 networks), so they do not spend time in too much things, this is the reason because we use Layer 2 networks. The main aim for this work has been to study CE ant systems in Layer 2 networks and ameliorate the behaviours that can be improved by simulations of previous theoretical study. After 4 proposals studied, two of them have been discarded and other two have been confirmed as improvements. These improvements let us to use two different cost functions (for different environments of the network) in order to decide the optimal path.