Shadow prices for LLR and ALBA

Shadow prices are calculated for least loaded routing (LLR) and aggregated least busy alternative (ALBA) routing in circuit-switched networks for the blocking probability obtained from fixed point algorithms. Numerical results are presented for the calculation of these shadow prices in small networks. As an application of these shadow prices, we also formulate a constrained optimization problem to calculate the sum capacity of LLR and ALBA for a given network. Comparison of the sum capacities indicate that the optimization using shadow prices results in a significant improvement. This provides evidence that matching capacity distribution to traffic is important even when adaptive routing schemes such as LLR and ALBA are used in the network. We also calculate upper bounds on the sum capacity which serve to indicate how well the optimized LLR and ALBA perform. The numerical results also confirm that with a small number of states the capacity of ALBA approaches that of LLR