A Taxonomy for Multi-Period Resource Allocation Problems at System Edges (MPRASE Taxonomy)

Providing guaranteed QoS, be it statistical or deterministic, necessarily requires allocation of scarce resources. This might happen on a session or on an aggregate basis, nevertheless, it is conceivable that at least at system edges scarcity of resources, exposed in the form of non-negligible (virtual) costs, will prevail to necessitate explicit allocation of resources as opposed to pure overdimensioning. An example of this logic is constituted by the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture which is largely based on explicit bilateral Service Level Agreements (SLA) between peering providers. Often such resource allocation decisions are done on a multi-period basis because resource allocation decisions at a certain point in time may depend on earlier decisions and thus it can turn out sub-optimal to look at decisions in an isolated fashion. In earlier papers we discussed the general class of optimization problems that are applicable in these scenarios. We call the class MPRASE (Multi-Period Resource Allocation at System Edges). In this paper we present a taxonomy for all the MPRASE problems.