Admission control of CBR/VBR and ABR/UBR call arrival streams: a Markov decision approach

This paper evaluates a Markov decision approach to connection admission control of guaranteed services and best effort services. Two different schemes that support integration of guaranteed services and best effort services are evaluated: a preemptive scheme and a partial blocking scheme. The Markov decision approach finds policies that are optimal in terms of long-term reward. The Markov decision policy performs intelligent blocking which implements bandwidth reservation for wide-band traffic. Numerical results with three traffic classes, a narrow-band and a wide-band guaranteed class and a narrow-band best effort class, show that the Markov decision method, applied to both the preemptive and the partial blocking scheme, yields higher long-term reward than the complete sharing method when the amount of wide-band guaranteed traffic is large. The results also show that the preemptive scheme and the partial blocking scheme are efficient for different types of traffic mixes.