When your persistent, try-hard attitude to solve a difficult
problem takes you nowhere, try stepping into the shoes of outsiders and try to
think it their way.
In an attempt to refresh the thinking patterns about network
congestion in airline industry, I came across the ideas in telecom industry facing the similar problem and played a bit with words turning them the airline way.
Network congestion
In route networking and queuing theory, network congestion
occurs when a hub is carrying so many flights that its quality of service
deteriorates. Typical effects include flight delays, blocking of new
connections, and passenger desperation. Network protocols which use aggressive
flight cancellations to reduce network congestion can exhibit output known as
congestive collapse. Modern networks use congestion control and congestion
avoidance techniques to try to avoid congestion collapse. These include
reduction in queuing. Another method to avoid the negative effects of network
congestion is implementing priority schemes, so that some flights are
transmitted with higher priority than others. Priority schemes do not solve network
congestion by themselves, but they help to alleviate the effects of congestion
for some services.
Congestion Management
Congestion management mechanisms include the use of
buffers that can temporarily store flights in one or more queues until they can
be forwarded further. As the buffers fill to capacity, flights can be
discarded, perhaps selectively based on a priority or quality of service (QoS)
mechanism. If a network is designed to absorb this impact, a skilled 'router'
may have the ability to identify and exercise alternate paths if the primary
path is suffering congestion levels that exceed definable parameters
established in consideration of QoS objectives. Some network protocols provide
for a 'router', for example, to advise its peers of congestion conditions and
to instruct them to adjust their communication rates to avoid compounding the
situation. Similarly, 'routers' can advise customers to take it easy, or even
temporarily suspend their desire to travel by offered traffic until the
congestion condition relaxes. Finally, a 'router' can simply reject a call or
message by stranded passengers. In a voice network a central office (CO) provides the rejected
caller with a fast busy signal. If asked to sum up the message of this word game it woud be: different disruptions, same management problem!
