Optimal Quality of Service routing and admission control using the Utility Model

Real-time multimedia applications such as video and audio streaming, video conferencing and online collaboration are becoming increasingly popular. In order to guarantee effective support of many of these applications, the Internet must provide absolute Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for such parameters as network bandwidth and end-to-end delay by incorporating session admission control, session routing, and resource reservation. In this article, we present the Utility Model for optimal routing and admission control (RAC) of a data network supporting sessions requiring QoS guarantees. This model maps the optimal RAC problem to a Multiple-choice Multi-dimension 0-1 Knapsack Problem (MMKP), a variation of the classical 0-1 Knapsack Problem. We also present a design for an optimal RAC system based on the Utility Model. This method uses the MMKP formulation of the optimal RAC problem to provide an integrated solution of the session routing, admission control and resource allocation problems. Our experiments show that optimal RAC using the MMKP formulation (OptRAC) would provide 7–16% more revenue than the revenue provided by a traditional RAC system (TradRAC). © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.