A study of a distributed approach for VPC network management

By reserving transmission capacity on a series of links from one node to another, making a virtual path connection (VPC) between these nodes, several benefits are made. VPCs will enable segregation of traffic with different QoS, simplify routing at transit nodes, and simplify connection admission control. As telecommunications traffic experience variations in the number of calls per time unit, due to office hours, inaccurate forecasting, quick changes in traffic loads, and changes in the types of traffic (as in introduction of new services), there is a need to cope for this by adaptive capacity reallocation between different VPCs. The focus of this paper is to introduce a distributed approach for VPC management and compare it to a centralised one. Our results show that the distributed approach is an interesting alternative.