EFFICIENTLY PROVIDING MULTIPLE GRADES OF SERVICE WITH PROTECTION AGAINST OVERLOADS IN SHARED RESOURCES

Multiservice telecommunications systems require different grades of service for different customers, including protection against overloads caused by other customers. One way to provide multiple grades of service, including overload protection, is by partial sharing using upper-limit (UL) bounds, which specify an upper limit on the number of requests a customer is allowed at any time, and guaranteed-minimum (GM) bounds, which guarantee that there will always be space for a minimum number of requests from that customer. These bounds achieve effective separation with sharing and can be efficiently enforced and analyzed. Analysis is made possible by a new algorithm for computing blocking probabilities based on numerical transform inversion.