Agent Technology for Connection Admission Control in Complex ATM Networks

Connection Admission Control (CAC) in an ATM network is the set of actions taken by the network at connection set-up (or during call re-negotiation) in order to establish whether a (virtual channel/virtual path) connection can be accepted or rejected. A connection request is accepted only when sufficient resources are available to establish the call through the whole network at its required Quality of Service (QOS) and to maintain the agreed QOS of existing calls. Moreover, in a broadband environment a call can require more than one connection (e.g. for multimedia or multiparty services such as video-telephony/video-conferencing). In this case, CAC procedures have to be performed for each connection.