Research Planning Grants are one-time awards designed to help increase the number of new women investigators participating in NSF researchprograms, and to facilitate preliminary studies and other activities related to the development of competitive NSF research proposals. The project investigates the issues of call routing for integrated broadband networks in a multilayer control framework. The Principal Investigator is developing models to predict the network performance, algorithms and software to achieve optimal performance. The study involves the following issues: -How much bandwidth is required to satisfy a certain grade of service for the purposes of call admission and routing? -How should the probability of blocking be quantified as a function of the current state and traffic statistics? -For a given set of paths, how the calls should be routed dynamically according to the degree of congestion of these paths. -Stability of such dynamic routing methods. Markov decision theory is used in finding optimum routing policies.
