A measurement-based CAC strategy for ATM networks

In ATM networks, connection admission control (CAC) has been recognized as one of the most important means to provide satisfactory quality of service (QoS) and protect the network from congestion, especially for supporting real-time services such as voice and video. An efficient CAC strategy, which can both guarantee the QoS of admitted connections and achieve good resource utilization, then becomes a crucial issue for ATM network providers. The concept of a user-network traffic contract has been introduced by the ATM Forum. Starting from this point, we propose a measurement-based CAC strategy. We first discuss how to obtain an accurate description (traffic parameters) of user traffic by using on-line measurement in conjunction with dynamic renegotiation. The results show that the proposed strategy is reliable and simple to implement. We then move on to examine the possibility and methodology for exploiting the effect of statistical multiplexing in resource allocation to achieve higher network resource utilization.