Heterogeneous real-time traffic admission control in differentiated services domains

In differentiated services (DiffServ) domains, where services are provisioned on a per-class basis, admission control is an essential control factor in order to ensure that congestion is avoided and that the quality of service (QoS) requirements of individual flows are met. We consider traffic-engineered and provisioned IP differentiated services domains able to support real-time traffic. We present a new measurement-based admission control (MBAC) scheme that uses measurements of aggregate bandwidth only, without keeping the state of any per-flow information. In our scheme there is no assumption made on the nature of the traffic characteristics of the real-time sources, which can be of any heterogeneous nature. Through simulations we show that the admission control scheme is robust with respect to traffic heterogeneity and measurement errors. We also show that our approach compares favorably against other admission control schemes found in the literature.