Admission of Packet Flows in a Self-Aware Network

The demand for stable and reliable networks which can offer packet delivery under Quality of Service constraints led to the development of autonomous networks that use adaptive packet routing in order to provide the best possible QoS. A mechanism which takes networks like these a step further in guaranteeing packet delivery even under strict QoS constraints, is Admission Control (AC). In this paper we describe a measurement-based admission control algorithm which tries to control the ingress traffic of a network by not allowing the entrance of connections which would negatively affect the QoS of the existing users of the network. It is a multiple QoS mechanism in which the users are the ones that specify the QoS levels they need in order to function properly. The impact that this new call will have on the QoS of the existing users, is based on measurements of probe traffic and monitoring of the network . The decision of whether to accept a new call or not is made using a novel algebra of QoS metrics, inspired by Warshall's algorithm, which searches whether there is a feasible path with enough resources to accommodate the new flow, without affecting the ongoing traffic.