Neural networks for routing communication traffic

The use of neural network computational algorithms to determine optimal traffic routing for communication networks is introduced. The routing problem requires choosing multilink paths for node-to-node traffic to minimize loss, which is represented by expected delay or some other function of traffic. The minimization procedure is implemented using a modification of the neural network traveling-salesman algorithm. Illustrative simulation results on a minicomputer show reasonable convergence in 250 iterations for a 16-node network with up to four links from origin to destination.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>