Nortel Networks Corporation

James J Yan

Osama S Aboul-Magd

Maged E Beshai

Tadeusz Drwiega

Mingxing Li

Management of the bandwidth capacity of tunnels through a network may be automated such that the network is adaptive to the stochastic nature of incoming traffic. An edge node in the network includes four main elements. Three of the elements, namely tunnel signaling, admission control and path selection, are derived from known technologies, generalized from their particular technologies and enhanced. With the addition of a fourth element, called capacity management, the four elements cooperate to accommodate the capacity needs of the traffic incoming to the network at the edge node. This accommodation is performed by estimating the traffic demand and dynamically adapting tunnels to the traffic demand.

Automated and adaptive management of bandwidth capacity in telecommunications networks

A dynamic admission control(AC) mechanism for accepting traffic service requests to a carrier IP network based on an iterative measurement method, is disclosed. For each service offered, a network planner assigns a certain amount of resources. A QoS manager keeps track of the amount of unused resources for each particular service. The amount of unused resources are estimated using actual measurements of load levels on various links of the network. Each router monitors the loading level on each of its outgoing interfaces. Those measurements are then transferred to the QoS manager upon request, or periodically at time intervals &ldquo;T&rdquo;.

Dynamic admission control for IP networks

A multi-class digital network is described. The network supports a plurality of digital services using dynamically-configured service bands to support various transport modes and qualities of service. A network control element receives traffic and network state information from the nodes. The network control element maintains a network topology and uses the network topology to compute route sets for the nodes. The network control element uses the traffic information to compute network size specifications. The switching nodes use rate controllers to divide the capacity of each link among the connection classes according to rules which ensure consistent service attributes for each band across the network. The rate controllers are adapted to support different transport modes and different packet sizes so that the deconstruction and reconstruction of packets at network edge devices is eliminated. The advantage is a flexible multi-class network which dynamically reconfigures to service traffic loads as service demands fluctuate.

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Nepean, Canada

James J Yan