Capacity overprovisioning for networks with resilience requirements

Abstract

This work focuses on capacity overprovisioning (CO) as an alternative to admission control (AC) to implement quality of service (QoS) in packet-switched communication networks. CO prevents potential overload while AC protects the QoS of the traffic during overload situations. Overload may be caused, e. g., by uctuations of the traffic rate on a link due to its normal stochastic behavior (a), by traffic shifts within the network due to popular contents (b), or by redirected traffic due to network failures (c). Capacity dimensioning methods for CO need to take into account all potential sources of overload while AC can block excess traffic caused by (a) and (b) if the capacity does not suffice. The contributions of this paper are (1) the presentation of a capacity dimensioning method for networks with resilience requirements and changing traffic matrices, (2) the investigation of the impact of the mentioned sources of overload (a-c) on the required capacity for CO in networks with and without resilience requirements, and (3) a comparison of this equired capacity with the one for AC. Our results show that in the presence of strong traffic shifts CO requires more capacity than AC. However, if resilience against network failures is required, both CO and AC need additional backup capacity for the redirected traffic. In this case, CO can use the backup capacity to absorb other types of overload. As a consequence, CO and AC have similar bandwidth requirements. These findings are robust against the network size.