Admission control based on end-to-end measurements

Abstract

This paper proposes a controlled load service that provides a network state with bounded and well known worst-case behavior. The service is primarily developed for real time applications. The full system for achieving quality of service to the application consists of an admission control combined with forward-error correction. The admission control is used to limit the packet-loss probability to a known value; the error-control coding (i.e., FEC) is then used to raise the quality above the level enforced by the admission control. The basic idea for the admission control is that a host must probe the path to the receiver before sending actual data. It accepts the session if the probe is received with no or at most a moderate amount of loss. The performance evaluation shows clearly that the proposed scheme avoids network congestion and high packet losses even over short time scales.