Self-Admission Control for IP Telephony Using Early Quality Estimation

If quality of service could be provided at the transport or the application layer, then it might be deployed simply by software upgrades, instead of requiring a complete upgrade of the network infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a self-admission control scheme that does not require any network support or external monitoring schemes. We apply the admission control scheme to IP telephony as it is an important application benefiting from admission control. We predict the quality of the call by observing the packet loss over a short initial period using an in-band probing mechanism. The quality prediction is then used by the application to continue or to abort the call. Using over 9500 global IP telephony measurements, we show that it is possible to accurately predict the quality of a call. Early rejection of sessions has the advantage of saving valuable network resources plus not disturbing the on-going calls.