Dynamic management of bursty traffic over multiple channels

As systems capabilities expand, increasingly demanding applications are developed resulting in the need to further increase system capabilities. Concurrent with the emergence of new applications, link technologies also have progressed and new technologies have been successfully integrated into todays networks. The main traffic types of todays applications and legacy services are carried using one of two types of service: a circuit of bandwidth equal to one of many pre-determined granularity levels, and a packet flow that is traffic-shaped and offers statistical guarantees. However, the traffic may be bursty at times. We develop architectural concepts that when incorporated in a next generation network make it scalable, reliable, flexible, and above all, simple. In particular, we focus on an end-to-end paradigm that heavily relies on upcoming advanced technologies. Our architectural concept comprises a minimally two-level hierarchical network infrastructure: a fiber-optics-based circuit-switched Core Network (CN) at Level 0, and several Collection/Distribution Networks (CDNs) at Level 1. Both levels deploy multiple communication channels to transmit traffic from one end to the other and manages traffic in two steps: 1) the requests are accepted as long as resources are not fully committed; (2) traffic is scheduled dynamically to support the accepted requests just-in-time to allow sources to transmit. This approach reduces overall latency, increases the throughput, and reduces the overall blocking probability.