State reduction and call admission in multirate circuit-switched networks

In a circuit (real, or virtual) switching network, call admission control plays a central role in determining the throughput and grade of service of a network. This issue, of course, is not new, but the characteristics of multirate and high speed of a broadband integrated service digital network (ISDN) make the problem quite different from its counterpart in a telephone (single-rate) network. The tremendous number of states, created by the huge bandwidth of a broadband network and its multirate characteristic, makes the design and analysis of call admission policies in a broadband network computationally intractable. We propose a state grouping method to reduce the total number of states. An important characteristic of the method is that the total gain of a policy remains unchanged in the reduced state space. This means that the search for a better policy can be conducted in the reduced state space created by the state reduction method. The time complexity is drastically reduced