Adaptive call admission and bandwidth control in DVB-RCS systems

The paper presents a control architecture aimed at implementing bandwidth optimization combined with call admission control (CAC) over a digital video broadcasting (DVB) return channel satellite terminal (RCST) under quality of service (QoS) constraints. The approach can be applied in all cases where traffic flows, coming from a terrestrial portion of the network, are merged together within a single DVB flow, which is then forwarded over the satellite channel. The paper introduces the architecture of data and control plane of the RCST at layer 2. The data plane is composed of a set of traffic buffers served with a given bandwidth. The control plane proposed in this paper includes a layer 2 resource manager (L2RM), which is structured into decision makers (DM), one for each traffic buffer of the data plane. Each DM contains a virtual queue, which exactly duplicates the corresponding traffic buffer and performs the actions to compute the minimum bandwidth need to assure the QoS constraints. After computing the minimum bandwidth through a given algorithm (in this view the paper reports some schemes taken in the literature which may be applied), each DM communicates this bandwidth value to the L2RM, which allocates bandwidth to traffic buffers at the data plane. Real bandwidth allocations are driven by the information provided by the DMs. Bandwidth control is linked to a CAC scheme, which uses current bandwidth allocations and peak bandwidth of the call entering the network to decide admission. The performance evaluation is dedicated to show the efficiency of the proposed combined bandwidth allocation and CAC.