Admission control and scheduling for improved QoS provisioning in transport and access networks

The increasing popularity of new multimedia services has made it desirable to support end-to-end Quality-of-Service (QoS) provisioning across multiple network domains. It is a very challenging problem and there is little progress in an implementable solution so far. Instead of providing a full solution at this stage, our goal in this thesis work is to implement QoS guarantees in each individual network that a user connection passes (e.g. transport networks and access networks), which is the necessary condition for an overall inter-networking QoS architecture. Time-Domain Wavelength Interleaved Network (TWIN) has been proposed by Bell Laboratories as a promising transport network architecture. TWIN performs efficient traffic grooming without resorting to electronic operations as is done today in SONET/SDH. Moreover, it eliminates the need for fast optical switches and optical buffers, which is still the main technical barrier faced by Optical Packet Switching (OPS) and Optical Burst Switching (OBS). To facilitate the analysis of TWIN, we build an analytical model for TWIN from which delay characteristics could be derived. Further, we propose a novel scheduling algorithm for TWIN that is able to provide improved QoS. The simulation results show that our algorithm could achieve much better QoS, in terms of smaller queueing delay and queueing delay variance, than existing works without sacrificing throughput.DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (EEE