Structural properties of optimal coordinate-convex policies for CAC with nonlinearly-constrained feasibility regions

Necessary optimality conditions for Call Admission Control (CAC) problems with nonlinearly-constrained feasibility regions and two classes of users are derived. The policies are restricted to the class of coordinate-convex policies. Two kinds of structural properties of the optimal policies and their robustness with respect to changes of the feasibility region are investigated: 1) general properties not depending on the revenue ratio associated with the two classes of users and 2) more specific properties depending on such a ratio. The results allow one to narrow the search for the optimal policies to a suitable subset of the set of coordinate-convex policies

Exponential penalty function control of loss networks

We introduce penalty-function-based admission control policies to approximately maximize the expected reward rate in a loss network. These control policies are easy to implement and perform well both in the transient period as well as in steady state. A major advantage of the penalty approach is that it avoids solving the associated dynamic program. However, a disadvantage of this approach is that it requires the capacity requested by individual requests to be sufficiently small compared to total available capacity. We first solve a related deterministic linear program (LP) and then translate an optimal solution of the LP into an admission control policy for the loss network via an exponential penalty function. We show that the penalty policy is a target-tracking policy--it performs well because the optimal solution of the LP is a good target. We demonstrate that the penalty approach can be extended to track arbitrarily defined target sets. Results from preliminary simulation studies are included.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051604000000936 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Call admission and routing in telecommunication networks.

by Kit-man Chan.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-86).Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Overview of Integrated Service Digital Networks --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- Multirate Loss Networks --- p.5Chapter 1.3 --- Previous Work --- p.7Chapter 1.4 --- Organization --- p.11Chapter 1.5 --- Publications --- p.12Chapter 2 --- Call Admission in Multirate Loss Networks --- p.13Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.13Chapter 2.2 --- Two Adaptive Routing Rules --- p.15Chapter 2.3 --- Call Admission Policies --- p.17Chapter 2.4 --- Analysis of Call Admission Policies --- p.25Chapter 2.4.1 --- "The CS, LO, GB and the EB Policies" --- p.25Chapter 2.4.2 --- The DP Policy --- p.29Chapter 2.5 --- Performance Comparisons --- p.32Chapter 2.6 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.35Chapter 3 --- Least Congestion Routing in Multirate Loss Networks --- p.41Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.41Chapter 3.2 --- The M2 and MTB Routings --- p.42Chapter 3.2.1 --- M2 Routing --- p.43Chapter 3.2.2 --- MTB Routing --- p.43Chapter 3.3 --- Bandwidth Sharing Policies and State Aggregation --- p.45Chapter 3.4 --- Analysis of M2 Routing --- p.47Chapter 3.5 --- Analysis of MTB Routing --- p.50Chapter 3.6 --- Numerical Results and Discussions --- p.53Chapter 3.7 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.56Chapter 4 --- The Least Congestion Routing in WDM Lightwave Networks --- p.60Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.60Chapter 4.2 --- Architecture and Some Design Issues --- p.62Chapter 4.3 --- The Routing Rule --- p.66Chapter 4.4 --- Analysis of the LC Routing Rule --- p.67Chapter 4.4.1 --- Fixed Point Model --- p.67Chapter 4.4.2 --- Without Direct-link Priority --- p.68Chapter 4.4.3 --- With Direct-link Priority --- p.72Chapter 4.5 --- Performance Comparisons --- p.73Chapter 4.6 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.75Chapter 5 --- Conclusions and Future Work --- p.79Chapter 5.1 --- Future Work --- p.8

Traffic Management and Congestion Control in the ATM Network Model.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networking technology has been chosen by the International Telegraph and Telephony Consultative Committee (CCITT) for use on future local as well as wide area networks to handle traffic types of a wide range. It is a cell based network architecture that resembles circuit switched networks, providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees not normally found on data networks. Although the specifications for the architecture have been continuously evolving, traffic congestion management techniques for ATM networks have not been very well defined yet. This thesis studies the traffic management problem in detail, provides some theoretical understanding and presents a collection of techniques to handle the problem under various operating conditions. A detailed simulation of various ATM traffic types is carried out and the collected data is analyzed to gain an insight into congestion formation patterns. Problems that may arise during migration planning from legacy LANs to ATM technology are also considered. We present an algorithm to identify certain portions of the network that should be upgraded to ATM first. The concept of adaptive burn-in is introduced to help ease the computational costs involved in virtual circuit setup and tear down operations

Video streaming over the internet using application layer multicast

Multicast is a very important communication paradigm. However, the deployment of multicast at IP layer is very slow, due to development and deployment issues such as ISPs' lack of incentives to update routers and inter-operability among multicast routing protocols. Application Layer Multicast (ALM) is a good alternative, where participating peers organize themselves into a logical overlay network atop the physical links and data is \tunneled" to each other via unicast links. The distinctive feature between IP multicast and ALM is that in ALM, data replication and forwarding functionalities are performed by participating peers (a.k.a. end systems), rather than the routers in Internet Protocol (IP) multicast. This fundamental difference enables ALM to be able to circumvent the development and deployment issues of IP multicast, by exploiting the resources (e.g., CPU cycles, storage, and access bandwidth) at the edge of the network. Nevertheless, it also raises other challenges, as peers are not as stable as routers since they may join and depart the on-going session at will. In this thesis, we address some of the challenges and they are summarized as follows: First, most current P2P or ALM streaming systems are equipped with a non-scalable membership management algorithm, greatly hindering their applicability to large-scale implementations over the Internet: they either rely on a central entity to handle group membership, or simply assume that all group members are visible to each other and flooding is the main mechanism used to disseminate membership-related updates to all participating group members. This implies that they are only applicable to small groups. Second, one of ALM's prominent features, flexility, has not been fully exploited: moving the multicast functionalities from lower layer (IP layer) to higher layer (Application layer) can greatly facilitate the integration of Quality-of-Service (QoS) support. The end-to-end philosophy states that it is better to leave those functionalities to higher layers because the heterogeneity among users' requirements can be handled much better by end users, rather than the network. However, QoS, and in particular, reliability has not been thoroughly addressed in existing ALM schemes. Third, admission control algorithms are essential to the success of any ALM system, due to the fact that in ALM, each peer acts as both a client as well as a server. On the other hand, the heterogeneity among peers, in terms of their computational power, storage capacity, and access bandwidth, further complicates the design of a good admission control. Several contributions are made to address the aforementioned research challenges, and they are outlined as follows: The first contribution is a devised gossip-based membership management algorithm that is able to collect and disseminate membership-related information under high rate of churn, using relatively low communication overheads. The second contribution is a reliability-centric multicast tree construction algorithm that greatly enhance peers' perceived reliability. The third contribution is a QoS-aware tree construction algorithm that accommodates the heterogeneity among peers, such as access bandwidth, network distance, and reliability. The last contribution is the identification of the admission control problem in this overlay video streaming

Preemption control of multi-class loss networks

This thesis addresses the analysis and optimization of preemption in multi-class loss networks. Preemption, admission control and rate adaptation, are control mechanisms that enable loss network operators to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees for admitted calls. This research includes two parts: i) performance characterization of a two parallel link loss network servicing multiple classes of calls under a speci c preemption and admission policy, and ii) preemption and admission control policy analysis for a single loss link servicing two classes of calls.In Part I, we consider a two parallel link multi-class loss network, where a call may preempt, if necessary, any calls with lower priorities and may in turn be preempted by any calls with higher priorities. The preemption policy permits both preemption from a preferred link to a backup link if possible, and eviction from either link if necessary. Our contributions in this part include: i) characterizing the rates of each class causing preemption of active lower priority calls, and therates of each class being preempted by an arriving higher priority call in Erlang-B functions when all classes share a common service rate; ii) simple expressions of these preemption rates through uniform asymptotic approximation; and iii) asymptotic approximation of these preemption rates using nearly completely decomposable (NCD) Markov chain techniques when classes have individual service rates.After analyzing the performance of a typical policy, we would also like to study various policies. In Part II, we analyze di erent preemption and admission control policies for a two-class loss link where per-class revenue is earned per unit time for each active call, and an instantaneous preemption cost is incurred whenever the preemption mechanism is employed. Our contributions in this part include: i) showing that under reasonable reward models, if we always preempt when the link is full, then it is better not to preempt at non-full states; ii) a su cient condition under which the average revenue of optimal preemption policy without admission control exceeds that of optimal admission control policy without preemption, which are established via policy improvement theorems fromstochastic dynamic programming.Ph.D., Computer Engineering -- Drexel University, 201