Hierarchical link-sharing allows multiple agencies, protocol families, or traffic types to share the bandwidth on a link in a controlled fashion. While it is not possible to completely predict the requirements that might evolve in the Internet over the next decade, we argue that controlled link-sharing is an essential component that can provide gateways with the flexibility to accomodate emerging applications and network protocols.
Generalized connectors provide the capability to connect a single input to one or more outputs.
Such networks play an important role in supporting any application that involves the distribution of information from one source to many destinations or many sources to many destinations. We present the first analytic model for evaluating blocking probability in generalized connectors. The model allows flexibility in specifying traffic fanout characteristics and network routing algorithms. Equations are derived for computing blocking probability for the important class of series-parallel networks. We investigate the accuracy of the equations by comparing the blocking probability computed using the equations to results from simulation.