Week 10

This week I had a meeting with my supervisor, Mr. Jeffrey and my collegues. This meeting is to brief us about the upcoming task we going to do which is Beta Testing. Firstly, he explain to us about Call Routing Strategies.

This is our meeting room

My collegue and I taking notes on what my supervisor said.

Call Routing Strategies

1. Lowest total talk time
2. Last agent
3. Fewest received calls
4. Round Robins

Round Robins

It is one of the oldest, simplest, fairest and most widely used scheduling algorithms, designed especially for time-sharing systems. A small unit of time, called timeslice or quantum, is defined. All runnable processes are kept in a circular queue. The CPU scheduler goes around this queue, allocating the CPU to each process for a time interval of one quantum. New processes are added to the tail of the queue.

The CPU scheduler picks the first process from the queue, sets a timer to interrupt after one quantum, and dispatches the process.

If the process is still running at the end of the quantum, the CPU is preempted and the process is added to the tail of the queue. If the process finishes before the end of the quantum, the process itself releases the CPU voluntarily. In either case, the CPU scheduler assigns the CPU to the next process in the ready queue. Every time a process is granted the CPU, a context switch occurs, which adds overhead to the process execution time.

Last Agent

Last agent optimization is a technique that reduces the number of sync point flows in a sync point tree. The initiator picks one adjacent agent as a last agent. Then the initiator sends prepare to the agents that were not selected as a last agent. When these agents all respond with a request commit back to the initiator, the initiator sends the last agent a request commit rather than the usual prepare. This last agent is free to select one of its cascaded initiators to be the last agent and so on. The ultimate last agent is given the commit decision for the entire sync point tree.

During the meeting, Mr Jeffrey assigned us some task. We have to design a call flow, for example when customer call our customer services center what they will heard. Besides that, we also need to create 30 Q & A for preparation.

sample of call flow