Piloting the Spanning Tree Protocol in home networks using a multi-agent system

Broadband access to the Internet at home was the first step in the emergence of so home networks. In a close future, the number of appliance connected will rise and the network will become the home backbone. Its architecture has to evolve to tackle those new challenges. After a study of the network requirements, this paper introduces a complete system to pilot the forwarding ensuring a proper QoS. This is achieved by a knowledge plane composed of agents embedded on devices, which are optimizing the Ethernet layer.