Scalable Services via Egress Admission Control

Allocating resources for multimedia traffic flows with real-time performance requirements is an important challenge for future packet networks. However, in large-scale networks, individually managing each traffic flow on each of its traversed routers has fundamental scalability limitations, in both the control plane’s requirements for signaling, state management, and admission control, and the data plane’s requirements for per-flow scheduling mechanisms. In this paper, we develop a scalable architecture and algorithm for quality-of-service management termed egress admission control. In our approach, resource management and admission control are performed only at egress routers, without any coordination among backbone nodes or per-flow management. Our key technique is to develop a framework for admission control under a general “black box” model, which allows for cross traffic that cannot be directly measured, and scheduling policies that may be ill-described across many network nodes. By monitoring and controlling egress routers’ class-based arrival and service envelopes, we show how network services can be provisioned via scalable control at the network edge. We illustrate the performance of our approach with a set of simulation experiments using highly bursty traffic flows and find that despite our use of distributed admission control, our approach is able to accurately control the system’s admissible region under a wide range of conditions.