A respective number of terminals are managed by network agents. When initializing a connection between two terminals, the network agent initializes the connection if the relevant terminals are arranged in the same bandwidth-uncritical area. If one of the terminals is arranged in a bandwidth-critical area, the network agent ascertains the requested bandwidth and sends a resource request to an associated bandwidth broker, which uses a topology function and knowledge of bandwidth used by existing connections to check the availability of the requested bandwidth in the bandwidth-critical area of the communication network. The use of network agents and the fact that resource requests are no longer required in the communication network dynamically reduces the load on bandwidth brokers and superordinate bandwidth brokers to a significant extent.