Trunk reservation analysis of TELUs' Edmonton telecommunication network

Following deregulation of the Canadian telecommunications industry in the early 1990s, telecommunication companies have experienced an increase in the demand on their networks. In this paper, we describe a proof-of-concept study implementing a control mechanism called trunk reservation in TELUs' Edmonton network. Trunk reservation limits the number of inefficient multi-link calls connected in the network when it approaches operational capacity, hence allowing more calls to connect via their direct paths. To find the optimal trunk reservation parameters for the Edmonton network, we used fixed-point approximations of a birth–death process to formulate the problem, which we solve using simulated annealing. Our results indeed show that trunk reservation decreases the amount of multi-link calls in the network. We also show that our network with non-uniform trunk reservation parameters performs better than networks where the number of reserved trunks is determined using a “one size fits all” approach.