A continuous state space model of multiple service, multiple resource communication networks

The merging of telephone and computer networks is introducing multiple resources into networks, and information is becoming increasingly distributed across the network. Related services are being integrated onto a single network rather than being offered on separate uncoordinated networks. We focus upon communication networks that integrate multiple services using multiple resources. In previous work, such networks have been modeled by multidimensional Markov chains with product form distributions. We approximate the distribution on the original discrete state space by a similar product form distribution on a continuous state space. We consider access control of such a system and prove that the resulting optimal coordinate-convex control policy is convex. Based on this result, we suggest an algorithm for ending a near-optimal policy for the discrete problem that has much less complexity than existing methods for finding optimal or near-optimal policies