The objective of this research is to formulate strategies for resource allocation, control and pricing in communication networks that offer multiple services using shared resources. It is expected that these problems will become significant as networks continue to integrate diversified services. The Principal Investigator is modeling such a multiple service, multiple resource system, analyzing strategies for managing the system through control of service requests and pricing of services, and designing a set of algorithms to specify these strategies. The initial part of the research uses existing theories of Markov chains; the latter part draws from a richer domain of stochastic processes. The effort exposes issues and strategies for managing communication networks in particular, and contributes to modeling and analysis of any multiple service, multiple resource system in general. The research will be evaluated by the information content of the resulting control and pricing rules and by the complexity of the resulting algorithms.
