State aggregation using network flows for stochastic networks

QoS routing is the process of routing a connection based on the connection's resource requirements. The overhead involved in QoS routing increases with the network size. State aggregation is an important technique that makes QoS routing scalable. We propose a new domain state aggregation technique based on "network-flows", for stochastic networks. We propose a new fast heuristic algorithm to estimate the PMF of "maximum-flow" through a probabilistic flow network. Using this algorithm, we aggregate the bandwidth information in a domain and use it along with the path aggregate for routing. Through simulations, we show that stochastic estimation of traffic capacity is better than deterministic estimation and gives a better bandwidth admission ratio when compared with existing state aggregation techniques.