Approximation to the stationary distribution of information flows in a communication network

Abstract

In this study we propose a procedure to approximately compute the stationary distribution of the number of transmitting information flows in a communication network. The flows arrive to the network according to Poisson processes with exponentially distributed flow volumes, and traverse through a fixed path of transmission links in the network. The links have finite transmission capacities which are allocated to the information flows concurrently transmitting in the network according to some dynamic bandwidth sharing rule, which ensures the stability of the total number of information flows ongoing in the network. The procedure is based on dynamic approximation of the bandwidth allocated to concurrent information flows in the network. Numerical examples show that the procedure produces the numerical solution of the network within 2% of the true values.