Design and Configuration of PCN Based Admission Control in Multimedia Aggregation Networks

DSL aggregation networks are evolving to the standard platform for the delivery of multimedia services such as television and network based personal video recording. These multimedia services introduce large challenges for network operators as they are sensitive to packet loss. Therefore, admission control mechanisms are required to avoid congestion caused by allowing too many sessions. However, as multimedia services are often bursty it is not possible to reserve a fixed amount of bandwidth in the network since this policy will lead to either over-admittance or under-admittance. Recently, the IETF Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN) Working Group, proposed a measurement based admission control mechanism, where the network load is measured at each node and sessions are allowed or blocked at the edge of the network. In this paper, we extend and evaluate the PCN mechanism: we propose a new measurement algorithm for PCN, based on bandwidth metering, and determine the configuration guidelines for the parameters of both the original token bucket based approach and the novel algorithm for different network conditions and traffic types. More specifically, we study PCN´s applicability on protecting VBR video services, which is currently not studied in the PCN Working Group. Furthermore, we characterise the gain of PCN in comparison to a centralised admission control mechanism.