Flexible admission control for DiffServ access networks

In our earlier work, we have presented a simple measurement-based admission control (MBAC) scheme for modified Bandwidth Broker framework. In that scheme, real time (RT) traffic is basically able to starve non-admission controlled non-real time (NRT) traffic. By concentrating on real time application requirements it may be hard or even impossible to use other objectives in admission decisions; some non-real time applications (e.g., audio streaming) also need a certain minimum bandwidth for proper operation. In order to fix this problem, we present a solution, where the bottleneck link bandwidth is shared dynamically between real time and non-real time traffic. As a second enhancement to our earlier work, we propose the use of coefficients for the requested resources. These coefficients are derived from the price the user is paying for the connection. A requested peak rate is multiplied by the coefficient before comparison to available bandwidth. The proposed scheme is validated through simulations and its performance is compared against other admission control schemes. The simulation results show that it is possible for a network operator to gain more revenue with the proposed scheme.