A profit optimizing strategy for congestion control in signaling networks

Congestion control in the signaling system number 7 (SS7) is a necessity to fulfil the requirements of a telecommunication network that satisfy customers’ requirements on quality of service. Heavy network load is an important source of customer dissatisfaction as congested networks result in deteriorated quality of service. With the introduction of a Congestion Control Mechanism (CCM), that annihilates service sessions with a predicted completion time greater than the maximum allowed completion time for the session, network performance improve dramatically. Annihilation of already delayed sessions let other sessions benefit and increase the overall network throughput. This paper investigates the possibilities of using a decision theoretic approach that base the decision of annihilation on the average loss attached to each of the two possible actions, i.e. annihilate or not. Attributes are attached to each session describing the outcome of any performed CCM action, e.g. the economic loss connected with the annihilation of a session. The attributes are also used to calculate the network loss for a given network load. The results in this paper indicate that the decision theoretic approach can decrease the network loss up to 40% for the improved CCM (ICCM) compared to an ordinary CCM.