By close analogy of annealing for solids, we devise a new algorithm, called APS, for the time evolution of both the state and the synapses of the Hopfield's neural network. Through constrainedly random perturbation of the synapses of the network, the evolution of the state will ignore the tremendous number of small minima and reach a good minimum. The synapses resemble the microstructure of a network. This new algorithm anneals the microstructure of the network through a thermal controlled process. And the algorithm allows us to obtain a good minimum of the Hopfield's model efficiently. We show the potential of this approach for optimization problems by applying it to the will-known traveling salesman problem. The performance of this new algorithm has been supported by many computer simulations.

One performance limitation of the "Leaky Bucket algorithm" for usage parameter control and traffic management in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks is analyzed. Simulation results show that the conventional statistical bandwidth allocation method, which uses the most bursty pattern permitted by the Leaky Bucket algorithm, can not guarantee the QOS of established Virtual Channels/Paths (VC/VP). As a result, the VC/VP bandwidth allocation method based on the Leaky Bucket algorithm is proven to be unsatisfactory.