Dimensioning access link capacity for time-varying traffic with mixed packet streams and circuit connections

Access links that connect cloud data centers or enterprise networks to public networks are important parts of the network infrastructure and make up considerable portions of overall network expenditures. When a customer network is connected to an overlaid elastic optical network, determining the capacity of the access link is difficult. Furthermore, access links carry mixed packet streams and circuit connections, each with different performance requirements. Additionally, traffic loads are time-varying and often exhibit diurnal patterns. In this study, we formulate the access link capacity dimensioning problem as an optimization problem with a nested dynamic constraint satisfaction subproblem. Instead of using hard performance measures, such as packet delays and blocking probabilities, we use the probability of fulfillment with regard to different traffic arrival rates as the performance measure and the performance–cost ratio as our optimization objective. Numerical results suggest that a 7.5% to 19.47% cost savings can be achieved if resources are shared between packet streams and circuit connections. And if resource preemptions are allowed, the delay performance for packet streams can be improved by 12% with more frequent preemptions. Our study provides useful insights into the planning and operation of access links.