Admission Control in Self Aware Networks

The worldwide growth in broadband access and multimedia traffic has led to an increasing need for Qualityof-Service (QoS) in networks. Real time network applications require a stable, reliable, and predictable network that will guarantee packet delivery under QoS constraints. Network selfawareness through on-line measurement and adaptivity in response to user needs is one way to advance user QoS when overall network conditions can change, while admission control (AC) is an approach that has been commonly used to reduce traffic congestion and to satisfy users’ QoS requests. The purpose of this paper is to describe a novel measurement-based admission control algorithm which bases its decision on different QoS metrics that users can specify. The self-observation and selfawareness capabilities of the network are exploited to collect data that allows an AC algorithm to decide whether to admit users based on their QoS needs, and the QoS impact they will have on other users. The approach we propose finds whether feasible paths exist for the projected incoming traffic, and estimates the impact that the newly accepted traffic will have on the QoS of pre-existing connections. The AC decision is then taken based on the outcome of this analysis.