An Alternative LP Formulation of the Admission Control Problem in Multiclass Networks

Communication networks support an increasing number of classes of service (CoS). Admission control strategies can be planned within the Markov decision process (MDP) framework; with the linear programming (LP) formulation of the MDP, class level requirements are explicitly controlled. Scalability problems with respect to the number C of CoSs arise with the standard LP formulation. This note proposes an alternative LP formulation, which is more scalable: the problem size reduction is 0((C+ 1)²/2^C).