A Generic Admission-Control Methodology for Packet Networks

Admission control (AC) is highly important in packet networks with quality-of-service (QoS) requirements since the uncontrolled admission of new data connections can jeopardize the QoS of existing connections and degrade the overall network performance. It requires a priory knowledge of the network capacity, the estimation of which is intricate and complex due to the operational characteristics of various communication protocols, complex network topologies, and dynamic traffic behavior with QoS requirements. In this work, we propose a generic admission control (GAC) methodology where the network conditions between any given ingress-egress node pair are summarized into a single parameter, referred to as the "QoS index". It accounts for various traffic volumes and QoS requirements, like throughput, delay, and packet error rate. Using this QoS index we track the network performance by predicting the potential impact of a new connection admission on the index. The decision depends on whether the predicted value lies below 1. We discuss its wide applicability and feasibility to many types of packet networks, wired or wireless, independent of what communication protocols in use at various layers. We finally validate the proposed GAC methodology by extensive simulations, confirming a significant improvement in terms of network goodput and QoS outage probability compared to other existing statistics-based AC methodologies.