Graded Channel Reservation with Path Switching in Ultra High Capacity Networks

We introduce a new algorithmic framework for advanced channel reservation in ultra high speed networks, called Graded Channel Reservation (GCR). GCR allows users to specify minimum bandwidth and duration requirements for their connections. GCR returns the highest graded path, selected according to a general, multi-criteria optimization objective. In particular, if the optimization criterion is delay, we prove that GCR returns the earliest time available to establish the connection. The computational complexity is polynomial in the size of the graph and the number of pending requests. We introduce a number of variants to GCR, including one that that provides the capability to switch between different paths during a connection. We present practical methods for minimizing or limiting the number of path switches. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of GCR and its variants under various topological settings and applications workload. Our results show that, for certain traffic parameters, optimized path selection combined with path switching can reduce the average delay of requests by an order of magnitude and increase the saturation throughput by as much as 50%. I.