Framework of a flexible computer communication network

With the increasing speed of computers and communication links, and the successful convergence of both fields, computers connected by high speed links now represent an enormously large distributed computing system. At the same time, communication between man and machine is also becoming more diverse and personalized. Networking issues such as evolution of user services, seamless communication between hosts, failure recovery and integration of new technologies arise daily. Problem-specific approaches and corresponding solutions are available at considerable cost. However, a common requirement is adaptability of the computer network to a variety of changes. In this paper, we propose Flexible Computer Communication Networks (FN) as a uniform solution to most of these networking problems. The framework of Flexible Networks can be considered as an intelligent shell enclosing existing networking architectures. An agent-oriented implementation of a flexible network is outlined. The conversion of existing networks to flexible networks is shown to be incremental, and therefore practicable.