The explosive growth of distributed computing has been fuelled by many factors. Applications such as video conferencing, teleoperation and most notably the World Wide Web are placing ever more demanding requirements on their underlying communication systems. Having never been designed to support such diverse communication patterns these systems are failing to provide appropriate services to individual applications. Artificial neural networks have been used in areas of communication systems including signal processing and call management (Kartalopolus, 1994) | Telecommunications Optimization Heuristic and Adaptive Techniques. Edited by David W. Corne Martin J. Oates George D. Smith Copyright 2000 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBNs 0-471-98855-3 Hardback 0-470-84163X Electronic 12 Neural Networks for the Optimization of Runtime Adaptable Communication Protocols Robert S. Fish and Roger J. Loader Introduction The explosive growth of distributed computing has been fuelled by many factors. Applications such as video conferencing teleoperation and most notably the World Wide Web are placing ever more demanding requirements on their underlying communication systems. Having never been designed to support such diverse communication patterns these systems are failing to provide appropriate services to individual applications. Artificial neural networks have been used in areas of communication systems including signal processing and call management Kartalopolus 1994 . This chapter suggests a further use of neural networks for the maintenance of application tailored communication systems. In this context a neural network minimises the difference between an applications required Quality of Service QoS and that provided by the end-to-end connection. Problem area Communication systems based on the ISO Open System Interconnection OSI model historically suffered inefficiencies such as function duplication and excessive data copying. Telecommunications Optimization Heuristic and Adaptive Techniques edited by D. Corne . Oates and . Smith 2000 John Wiley Sons Ltd 200 Telecommunications Optimization Heuristic and Adaptive Techniques However a combination of modern protocol implementation techniques and an increase in the power and resources of modern computers has largely eliminated these overheads. Zitterbart 1993 defines the characteristics of various distributed applications and identifes four possible classes based on their communication requirements. Table illustrates these classifications and highlights the broad range .
