Dynamic Routing and Scheduling for Variable Bandwidth Circuit Switching

Variable bandwidth circuit switching is an approach in which a variable amount of bandwidth is reserved over the duration of circuit, in contrast to the fixed amount of bandwidth reserved in traditional circuit switching and advance reservation. In this paper, we focus on the routing and scheduling problem in variable bandwidth circuit switching. We develop three heuristics and compare the performances of the proposed heuristics to an optimal algorithm, which minimizes the net file transfer time. While the optimal algorithm minimizes the net file transfer time for a single given request, it may end up allocating excessive resources in the network, leading to higher blocking and end-to-end delay for subsequent requests. The results demonstrate that in a dynamic traffic scenario, the proposed heuristics outperform the optimal algorithm in terms of request blocking, end-to-end delay, and throughput with significantly lower time complexity.