Thursday 19 March 2015

The Value of Seeing Things from Different Perspective

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.

Inspirational or not, hope you enjoyed this word gaming.