Service differentiation and fairness control in WDM grooming networks

We investigate a call admission control (CAC) mechanism to provide service differentiation and fairness control in a WDM network with grooming capabilities. A WDM grooming network can handle different classes of traffic streams which differ by their bandwidth requirements. We assume that for each class, call interarrival and holding times are exponentially distributed. Using a Markov decision process approach, an optimal CAC policy is derived to provide service differentiation in the network. The policy iteration algorithm is used to numerically compute the optimal policy. Furthermore, we propose an heuristic decomposition algorithm with lower computational complexity and very good performance. Simulation results compare the performance of our proposed policy with that of complete sharing and complete partitioning policies.