An investigation of negotiations of quality of service parameters in a connection oriented telecommunications network environment

This dissertation is an investigation of negotiations of Quality of Service (QoS) parameters in an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) telecommunications network environment by use of a Market-like Operations paradigm. ATM transports telecommunications traffic in cells and uses negotiated QoS parameters for the cells in order to provide multiple services.; This work proved, by developing and using the Market-like Resource Allocation (MRA) paradigm, that QoS parameters can be negotiated, in a feasible manner, among several competing agents in a connection-oriented telecommunications network. The MRA paradigm was derived from the Market-like Operations that flat and hierarchical topologies. The process time for connection set-up procedure includes communications and computational times. The communications times were characterized using the General Purpose Simulation System simulator. The computational times were characterized using C++ software programs for the following four QoS constraint-base search algorithms: (1) the extended Dijkstra's Algorithm (DA), which is a greedy algorithm; (2) the BACK algorithm, which examines more candidate paths than DA; (3) the breadth-first search algorithm, which examines all possible paths and behaves in a non-polynomial (NP) manner; and (4) the PRUNE algorithm, which uses a more efficient exhaustive search. Expressions for run times were developed using curve-fitting techniques. The expressions for communications and computational times were incorporated into analytical models for studying scaling properties of the MRA. Additionally, stochastic simulation runs were done for the search algorithms to determine the Success Ratio (number of successfully routed connections compared to the total number of attempts) for ninety telecommunications network configurations.; Finally, I proved the scalability of the MRA for negotiating QoS parameters. For five telecommunications environments, I determined the regions of feasibility for various QoS constraint-based routing algorithms and the transition points between flat and hierarchical topologies. In conclusion, the Market-like Operations paradigm can be used for scalable negotiations of ATM QoS parameters in a feasible method.