Modeling VC, VP and VN Bandwidth Assignment Strategies in Broadband Networks

We introduce a methodology for establishing a connection between two nodes of a broadband network, that allows for securing sufficient resources at every intermediate node along the selected route, and thereby guarantee Quality of Service. We describe how a Virtual Path (VP) mechanism may be implemented within our framework, and compare the performance achieved by such a scheme with that of a Virtual Circuit (VC) approach. The notion of contract region is introduced as a mean of achieving coordination among distributed VPs. We presents two schemes for dividing the capacity of a link into contract regions for the various VPs passing through it, and we study their performance, in terms of both the schedulable and admissible load regions. Finally, we show how our methodologycan be applied to arbitrary public networks supporting virtual private networks.