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

Multiservice telecommunications systems require different grades of se rvice for different customers, including protection against overloads caused by other customers. One way to provide multiple grades of servi ce, including overload protection, is by partial sharing using upper-l imit (UL) bounds, which specify an upper limit on the number of reques ts a customer is allowed at any time, and guaranteed-minimum (GM) boun ds, which guarantee that there will always be space for a minimum numb er of requests from that customer. These bounds achieve effective sepa ration with sharing and can be efficiently enforced and analyzed. Anal ysis is made possible by a new algorithm for computing blocking probab ilities based on numerical transform inversion.