IMPROVING ROUTING PERFORMANCE OF ROUTERS AND CORE SWITCHES BY USING ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT NODE

Abstract

A routing protocol is plays an important role in today‟s communication networks. It is also a protocol which is in charge of determining how routers and core-switches interconnect with each other and forward the packets through the best path to travel from a source to a destination using a predefined and user defined path finding and search algorithms. The leading and well-known routing protocols are Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF).In the metrics of Internet routing protocol performance, each of them has different architecture, flexibility, route processing delays and convergence abilities. The A* search algorithm is the more optimal and complete search algorithm than that of Dijkstra algorithm and perfect for finding the shortest path. This thesis presents a simulation-based combination of Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) and A* search algorithm by using Network Simulator 2 (NS2). For performance evaluation of this combination, two network models are designed and configured with EIGRP and EIGRP with A* search algorithms. The evaluation of the proposed routing protocol is performed based on the quantitative metrics such as delay, throughput and packet loss through the simulated network models. The evaluation results show that EIGRP routing protocol with A* search algorithm provides better performance than EIGRP routing protocol.