Optimal trunk reservation for a group with multislot traffic streams

The problem of finding an optimal control by trunk reservation which maximizes the trunk utilization under parcel blocking constraints is studied, and two different linear programming formulations for this optimization problem are proposed. One is based on the proposed conversion of the conventional nonlinear programming formulation to a linear programming one, and the other is based on the theory of the Markov decision process. A property of the optimal control parameter values is discussed theoretically, and the improvement of trunk utilization achieved by applying the optimal control is evaluated numerically. Moreover, a suboptimal control which observes only the number of busy trunks is compared with the optimal one in traffic characteristics including peakedness of parcel overflows of the controlled trunk group