Coordination of distributed user-defined resource sharing supported by an intelligent communication network

The author puts forward a concept whereby commodity-type resource sharing should be supported by an `intelligent´ communication network. Each network station is equipped with a handler responsible for scheduling requests for resources and keeping track of current resource availability. The author points out that many media access control methods used in today´s communication networks ensure or can be modified to ensure identical order of received transmissions at all network stations, which reduces the resource allocation problem to scheduling requests in a single queue. Four heuristic resource allocation algorithms have been presented along with some anti-starvation measures. Their simulative evaluation can be helpful in the design of an algorithm that, given the traffic conditions and the system configuration, best trades average request delay for a fair access to resources