Enabling quality of service for end-to-end multimedia content delivery through admission control: Placement, functionality and benefits

Enabling Quality of Service (QoS) for End-to-End (E2E) multimedia content delivery is a challenging issue, especially when this E2E QoS chain needs to span multi-domain environments and heterogeneous network infrastructures. The approach proposed by the End-to-End QoS through Integrated Management of Content, Networks and Terminals (ENTHRONE) project to solve the E2E QoS problem in a scalable manner is to establish, and activate when needed, long-term QoS enabled aggregate pipes along this E2E QoS chain over multi-domain, and possibly heterogeneous, environments for the subsequent transport of individual flows from multimedia content providers to multimedia content consumers. In such an E2E QoS chain, admission control functions need to also be deployed in order to control the amount of traffic injected into these QoS enabled pipes so as to prevent overloads that can lead to QoS degradation. Using the ENTHRONE framework as a reference point, this paper proposes the use of appropriate admission control schemes at the granularity of individual flows and aggregate demands in order to achieve the objective of E2E QoS. Through simulations we show the proper joint operation of the schemes, their ability to support the desired QoS level, provide utilization gains and minimize service rejection probabilities.