Integrated-services communication networks that carry multiple traffic classes with different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements such as voice, video and data are becoming a reality. Each traffic class is characterized by the amount of bandwidth that it requests from the network, and the statistics of its arrival process and holding time in the network. A key feature of emerging high-speed networks is that these characteristics for the various traffic classes tend to be widely different. We focus on two important issues in such networks: (i) resource sharing for traffic with different bandwidth requirements and (ii) performance analysis algorithms to evaluate routing and admission control for such networks. High bandwidth calls typically experience high blocking probabilities without some form of admission control that reserves a certain portion of the network's resources to handle these calls. A goal of this research project would be to develop admission control and routing schemes to improve the blocking performance of high bandwidth calls without adversely affecting the network utilization. The presence of a large mixture of bandwidth classes also poses unique challenges in evaluating the performance of such admission control and routing schemes. We will develop a combination of analytical and simulation techniques that would provide fast and accurate estimates of the blocking probabilities for all traffic classes in the network.
