There is a rapidly growing need for making high capacity digital global networks resilient to variations in traffic load and network element failures. This can be accomplished by robust network engineering and greater network flexibility. The primary vehicles for achieving network flexibility objectives are dynamic routing and/or dynamic capacity allocation techniques. This paper presents an overview of the recent progress and new challenges in developing those advanced network control methodologies for global networks that exploit revolutionary new telecommunications technologies.

Along with the advances in network digitalization and the development of new service capabilities, international telecommunication networks have been evolving toward ISDNs. The introduction of computer-controlled network operation techniques such as dynamic routing in the ISDN era will facilitate the highly efficient use of network resources with high reliabilities. In this paper, an international ISDN traffic profile model is introduced, and then a simple design method for international network using the dynamic routing of the pre-planned time-varying type is presented. A constraint concerning traffic survivability for robust network design is taken into account in the proposed method. The improvement of resource utilization and reliability performance attained by the introduction of the dynamic routing scheme is numerically evaluated based upon the design results for simplified models of international ISDNs.

Circuit access control is a traffic control technique of rejecting calls arriving at a group of specified circuits to make the group free at a target scheduled time so that the capacity may be dynamically reallocated to serve other traffic demand. This technique plays an important role for resource allocation control in state-of-the-art capacity reconfigurable networks as well as for switching calls on a reserved basis in the ISDNs. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive scheme for circuit access control in order to overcome the inefficiency of the conventional deterministic scheme. The presented scheme is based only on knowledge about service time and bandwidth characteristics of calls. The transitional behavior of the circuit group under the scheme is analyzed, and the gain in utilization achieved by the adaptive scheme is examined. We treat a model of the circuit group shared by multi-slot calls with different service times, and describe the results of the transient analysis and the approximation method for evaluating the gains.

This paper is concerned with bandwidth reservation for circuit groups which handle calls requesting asymmetric forward and backward multi-connections. A model of circuit group with sub-group configuration is treated, and two types of the bandwidth reservation schemes for the model are studied in this paper. One is a global scheme with monitoring the whole circuit group, and the other is a local scheme with monitoring each sub-group independently. The problems of optimizing the reservation parameters are formulated, and optimization methods for the problems are proposed. Numerical example are presented, and effectiveness of the reservation schemes with using the optimized parameters is numerically examined.

This paper is concerned with two important planning problems for transport network planning; circuit routing problems and facility planning problems. We treated these optimization problems by taking into account survivability requirements. In the circuit routing problem tackled in this paper, therefore, optimization of circuit restoration plans, namely allocation of spare capacity for assumed failure scenarios is considered together with optimization of circuit routing in a no failure case. In the facility planning problems, failure scenarios of new facilities whose installation is yet to be determined are considered. In this paper, we present a formulation of these two optimization problems, and give 1) optimization algorithms based on the IA (Increment Assignment) method for routing problems and 2) optimization algorithms based on a combination of the GA (Genetic Algorithm) and the IA method for facility planning problems. The IA based routing algorithm can cope flexibly with various constraints on practical network operations and is applicable to large-scale complicated network models without causing a rapid increase in computation time. The GA based facility planning algorithm includes the IA based algorithm as a function for evaluating objective function values. Taking advantage of the important features of the IA based algorithm, we propose an acceleration technique for the GA based facility planning algorithm. In this paper, several numerical examples are provided and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is numerically evaluated.

Cost minimization and enhancement of robustness are the major objectives in the design and control of corporate networks. The trade-off between private facility cost and expense for public network use is an important cost-effectiveness criterion. In this paper, we propose a traffic control method which minimizes cost for public network usage in the international corporate networks under both normal and abnormal conditions. The method is a combination of alternative routing and dynamic trunk reservation in which the number of reserved trunks at a link vary with 24-hour profiles of traffic and public network charges between nodes. An analytical performance evaluation method is described, and the effectiveness of the control method is evaluated based on numerical examples.

The embedded Markov processes associated with Markovian queueing systems are closely related, and their relationships are important for establishing an analytical basis for performance evaluation techniques. As a first step, we analyze the embedded processes associated with a general M/M/1 queueing system. Linear transformations between the infinitesimal generators and the transition probability matrices of embedded processes at arrival and departure times are explicitly derived. Based upon these linear transformations, the equilibrium distributions of the system states at arrival and departure times are obtained and expressed in terms of the equilibrium distribution at arbitrary times. The approach presented here uncovers an underlying algebraic structure of M/M/1 queueing systems, and establishes an algebraic methodology for analyzing the equilibrium probabilities of the system states at arrival and departure times for more general Markovian queueing systems.

TINA (Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture) has been developed to support efficient operation of a wide range of complex services. TINA is effective in building advanced multimedia related services and provides effective solutions for complex service control and management along with a high level of quality of services. However the benefits and effectiveness of TINA for other types of services such as ordinary telephone services and facsimile messaging services are not clear. This paper clarifies how to apply TINA to control and management of computer telephony (CT) services and ordinary telephony services. We designed and implemented CT services in a distributed processing environment (DPE), and in particular a click-to-dial service, as a target for our study. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the design through qualitative and quantitative evaluation. The results of our study show that the distributed processing technique, based on component concepts makes it easy to build and extend CT services, and also that TINA service architecture is applicable to ordinary telephony and advanced CT services.

The recent progress of B-ISDN signaling systems has enabled networks to handle calls which require a wide variety of ATM connection sets. This paper is concerned with the circuit group which handles calls requesting asymmetric forward and backward multi-connections, and has the capability of both bandwidth negotiation and bandwidth reservation as a traffic control for enhancing call blocking performance. A model of the circuit group is first established focusing on the call level characteristics of the group, and then a method based on the reduced load approximation and an approximate analysis of a multirate group is proposed for calculating approximate blocking probabilities. The accuracy of the approximation method is evaluated numerically by comparing with an exact method and simulation. Further the impact of bandwidth negotiation and reservation on call blockings is examined based on numerical examples.

This paper addresses a technique for multiplexing voice streams into an IP packet for efficient VoIP transportation. The principles and distinctive schemes are presented and a comparative performance evaluation of the schemes based on a prototype is provided. In this paper, a scheme using a dynamic packet length threshold is proposed. As a conclusion, we show the scheme is beneficial for shortening packetization delay compared with the scheme in which multiple coded blocks in one voice stream are carried by an IP packet and superior with respect to reducing the header overhead and the number of generated packets.