Concurrent ATM connection setup reducing need for VP provisioning

A common approach used for decreasing end-to-end connection setup delay in ATM networks is to provision partial segments a priori using virtual path connections (VPCs). In this paper, we present an analysis to study the effect of such provisioning. The analysis demonstrates that significant savings in bandwidth, and hence network costs, are achieved if the number of provisioned VPCs are minimized, especially if there is uncertainty in the traffic pattern characterization. For a given example, we show that to achieve a 0.1% blocking probability requirement, if link capacities are shared (i.e., not partitioned a priori to provisioned VPCs), resource savings of 14.4%, 47.9% or 80% are possible under exact, approximate and poor traffic characterizations, respectively. If the above bandwidth savings are to be achieved in networks that use traditional node-by-node connection setup approaches, end-to-end connection setup delay will increase. In this paper, we propose a new connection setup algorithm that allows the savings in bandwidth obtained through sharing while at the same time controlling the connection setup delay