Computational techniques for accurate performance evaluation of multirate, multihop communication networks

Computational techniques are presented for the connection-level performance evaluation of communication networks, with stochastic multirate traffic, state-dependent admission control, alternate routing, and general topology - all characteristics of emerging integrated service networks. The techniques involve solutions of systems of fixed-point equations, which estimate equilibrium network behavior. Although similar techniques have been applied with success to single-rate fully connected networks, the curse of dimensionality arises when the techniques are extended to multirate, multihop networks, and the cost of solving the fixed point equations exactly is exponential. This exponential barrier is skirted by exploiting, in particular, a close relationship with the network reliability problem, and by borrowing effective heuristics from the reliability domain. A series of experiments are reported on, comparing the estimates from the new techniques to the results of discrete-event simulations.