Control Plane Stability with Retrial Traffic and Comparison of Hard- and Soft-State Protocols

It has been recognized that in the current Internet it is important to control not only congestion caused by overload of the data plane but also congestion caused by overload of the control plane. In particular, it is important to avoid congestion from retrial traffic. This paper focuses on RSVP-based communication services. In general, users reattempt to set up connections not only when transmission systems are overloaded but also when processing systems in the network are overloaded. The latter is caused by user psychology: an increase in the waiting time for the processing to be completed tends to increase his or her reattempts. Thus, it is important to manage both transmission and processing resources properly. In this paper, we introduce a model that takes account of both transmission and processing systems, and we examine the behavior of retrial traffic. In addition, we compare the system stability achieved by two different resource management methods, the hard-state method and the soft-state method.