The Multiwavelength Optical Networking (MONET) program consists of a consortium of industrial partners, working together with the intent to demonstrate the key capabilities needed for configurable WDM networks. This involves integrating WDM technologies with optical switching technologies to provide a managed, high capacity, national scale WDM server layer to transport optical signals transparently across multiple interworking subnetworks.

Bursts from a number of variable bit rate sources allocated to a virtual path with a given capacity can inundate the channel. Buffers used to take care of such bursts can fill up rapidly. The buffer size limits its burst handling capability. With large bursts or a number of consecutive bursts, the buffers fill up and this leads to high cell losses. Channel reconfiguration with dynamic allocation of spare capacities is one of the methods used to alleviate such cell losses. In reconfigurable networks, spare capacity allocation can increase the channel rates for short durations, to cope with the excess loads from the bursts. The dynamic capacity allocations are adaptable to the loads and have fast response times. We propose heuristic rules for spare capacity assignments in ATM networks. By monitoring buffer occupancy, triggers which anticipate excess traffic can be used to assign spare capacities to reduce the cell loss probabilities in the network.

Circuit access control is a traffic control technique of rejecting calls arriving at a group of specified circuits to make the group free at a target scheduled time so that the capacity may be dynamically reallocated to serve other traffic demand. This technique plays an important role for resource allocation control in state-of-the-art capacity reconfigurable networks as well as for switching calls on a reserved basis in the ISDNs. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive scheme for circuit access control in order to overcome the inefficiency of the conventional deterministic scheme. The presented scheme is based only on knowledge about service time and bandwidth characteristics of calls. The transitional behavior of the circuit group under the scheme is analyzed, and the gain in utilization achieved by the adaptive scheme is examined. We treat a model of the circuit group shared by multi-slot calls with different service times, and describe the results of the transient analysis and the approximation method for evaluating the gains.