Auction-Based Admission Control for Self-Aware Networks

In the future, networks will be increasingly Quality-of-Service (QoS) oriented, and admission control will play a vital role in ensuring that relevant QoS requirements of flows are satisfactorily met. Recent research viewing the network as a chargeable resource, associating a pricing mechanism for different types of data, is also becoming increasingly prevalent. In this paper, we introduce the idea of using auctions to coordinate the distributed admission control system for self-aware networks we have developed in the past. The proposed system employs the use of quota at each of the nodes in order to regulate congestion in the network. The current level of quota at a node indicates the amount of additional burden the node is permitted to introduce into the network through the acceptance of flows. If a node does not have enough quota to admit an incoming flow, it can request additional top-up quota whose allocation is controlled by an auctioning mechanism.