Congestion Parameters for Adaptive Routing in Virtual Circuit Networks

An analysis of how to incorporate some important congestion parameters into an adaptive routing strategy for a packet network with multiple classes of virtual circuits is presented. The multiple classes of virtual circuits might be associated with different services offered on the network. These congestion parameters include the number of virtual circuits established on outgoing links and the number of information packets in the buffers for outgoing links. Adaptive routing strategies, formed from linear combinations of these two congestion parameters, are investigated. The objective is to set up calls such that the average delay of information packets is minimized.