Circuit-switched “network capacity” under QoS constraints

Usually the network-throughput maximization problem for constant-bit-rate (CBR) circuit-switched traffic is posed for a fixed offered load profile. Then choices of routes and of admission control policies are sought to achieve maximum throughput (usually under QoS constraints). However, similarly to the notion of channel “capacity,” it is also of interest to determine the “network capacity;” i.e., for a given network we would like to know the maximum throughput it can deliver (again subject to specified QoS constraints) if the appropriate traffic load is supplied. Thus, in addition to determining routes and admission controls, we would like to specify the vector of offered loads between each source/destination pair that “achieves capacity.” Since the combined problem of choosing all three parameters (i.e., offered load, admission control, and routing) is too complex to address, we consider here only the optimal determination of offered load for given routing and admission control policies. We provide an off-line algorithm, which is based on Lagrangian techniques that perform robustly in this rigorously formulated nonlinear optimization problem with nonlinear constraints. We demonstrate that significant improvement is obtained, as compared with simple uniform loading schemes, and that fairness mechanisms can be incorporated with little loss in overall throughput.