A Method Involving Antithetic Sampling for Estimating Blocking Probabilities in a Circuit-Switched Network

The usual Applied Probability models for circuit-switched telecommunications networks provide a very simple expression for the blocking probability, the probability that a request for transmission cannot be met owing to the unavailability of sufficiently many circuits. Unfortunately, the evaluation of blocking probabilities turns out to be extremely difficult for any network of reasonable size. For this reason, various computer simulation techniques have been developed. We describe a new method for estimating blocking probabilities which is an improvement on the so-called individual state selection method