Traffic management of a satellite communication network using stochastic optimization

The performance of nonhierarchical circuit switched networks at moderate load conditions is improved when alternate routes are made available. Alternate routes, however, introduce instability under heavy and overloaded conditions, and under these load conditions network performance is found to deteriorate. To alleviate this problem, a control mechanism is used where, a fraction of the capacity of each link is reserved for direct routed calls. In this work, a traffic management scheme is developed to enhance the performance of a mesh-connected, circuit-switched satellite communication network. The network load is measured and the network is continually adapted by reconfiguring the map to suit the current traffic conditions. The routing is performed dynamically. The reconfiguration of the network is done by properly allocating the capacity of each link and placing an optimal reservation on each link. The optimization is done by using two neural network-based optimization techniques: simulated annealing and mean field annealing. A comparative study is done between these two techniques. The results from the simulation study show that this method of traffic management performs better than the pure dynamic routing with a fixed configuration