Traffic management of a satellite communication network using mean field annealing

The performance of non-hierarchical circuit switched networks at moderate load conditions is improved when alternate routes are made available. However, alternate routes introduce instability under heavy and overloaded conditions, and under these load conditions network performance is found to deteriorate. To alleviate this problem, a control mechanism that reserves a fraction of the capacity of each link for direct routed calls is used. In this paper, a traffic management scheme is developed to enhance the performance of a mesh-connected, circuit-switched satellite communication network. The network load is measured and the network is continually adapted by reconfiguring the map to suit the current traffic conditions. The reconfiguration of the network is done by properly allocating the capacity of each link and placing an optimal reservation on each link. The optimization is done by using a neural network-based optimization technique called mean field annealing. The simulation results show that this method of traffic management performs better than pure dynamic routing with a fixed configuration.