A testbed for network performance evaluation and its application to connection admission control algorithms

Multimedia networks will support a wide range of applications with different requirements and traffic characteristics. Connection Admission Control (CAC) algorithms are used to decide whether an incoming connection should be accepted or rejected in order to maintain the quality of service (QoS) demanded by the applications. The objective of this work is to present an environment we developed useful for performance analysis, measurements and experimentation, in particular for testing resource usage based on different traffic characteristics. We demonstrate how a study of the effectiveness of different CAC algorithms can be performed from measurements collected using an ATM switch and the tools we developed. For the studies we selected and implemented two CAC algorithms, one for a non-regulated traffic, proposed by [14], and other for a leaky-bucket regulated traffic, proposed by [5]. The environment tools include a traffic generator supporting IP and native-ATM as well as a CAC module that implements the algorithms above and can be used in conjunction with our test environment. These tools are currently part of the Tangram-II modeling environment [3,11] and available to download.