Limited waiting: an adaptive overload-control strategy for circuit switched networks

The authors present an adaptive control strategy for circuit-switched networks in which calls are permitted to wait for a limited time to be carried on a low-cost preferred route. The strategy uses network resources more efficiently than other conventional approaches, exhibiting lower blocking of calls under overload conditions. The proposed strategy is also adaptive in that, when there is little network congestion, there is no penalty for the policy, in contrast to other schemes in which improved performance under overload is achieved at the cost of degraded performance at lower bounds. The authors analyze an exactly solvable model and present simulation results for a more general network