Packing and Least-Loaded Based Routing in Multi-Rate Loss Networks

We examine various schemes for dynamically routing virtual circuits (VCs) in a multi-class network. A VC setup request may be rejected by admission control because resources are either unavailable or being reserved for future incoming VCs. We examine least-loaded based schemes, which attempt to balance the load among available routes. In addition, we examine packing based schemes, which attempt to reduce bandwidth fragmentation possibly at the expense of load balancing. Our simulation results show that under skewed workload, our packing based scheme outperforms a traditional least-loaded based scheme in terms of revenue (or equivalently, network utilization). Under uniform workload, both schemes provide similar revenue.