As telecommunications traffics experience variations in the intensity due to office hours, inaccurate forecasting, quick changes in traffic load, and changes in the types of traffic (as in introduction of new services), there is a need to cope for this by adaptive change of the capacity in the network. This can be done by reserving transmission capacity on a series of links from one node to another making a virtual path (VP) between these nodes. The control of the VPs can be centralised, distributed or local. The idea of local and distributed approaches is to increase the robustness and performance compared to a central approach, which is depending on a central computer for the virtual path network (VPN) management. The main focus in this paper is to simulate different strategies and compare them to each other. The measured parameters are blocked traffic, the amount of signalling, unused capacity and maximal VP blocking. The simulation is done in a non-hierarchical network with one type of traffic i.e. a VP-subnetwork using statistical multiplexing and having Poissonian traffic streams. The size of the network is moderate. The VPN management will handle slow to medium fast variations, typically on the order of minutes up to hours. The traffic variations are met by reshaping the VPN in order to match the current demands.

För att utnyttja ett tele/datornäts kapacitet på bästa möjliga sätt och samtidigt garantera kvalitet på överföringen av data, reserveras kapacitet på nätet med sk logiska länkar (VP=Virtual Paths). Tidigare arbeten har fokuserats på att en central dator gör detta jobb. Denna publikation utvärderar två andra metoder. I den distribuerade metoden är den centrala intelligensen borttagen och uppgiften att bestämma VP-nätets utseende och kapaciteter är fördelad över noderna själva. Den andra är en i sin helhet lokal metod där samarbetet mellan noderna helt har borttagits.