Abstract.
Calls that make large, persistent demands for network
resources will be denied consistent service, unless the
network employs adequate control mechanisms.
Calls of this type include video conferences.
Although overprovisioning network capacity would
increase the likelihood of accepting these calls, it is
a very expensive option to apply uniformly in a large
network, especially as the calls require high bandwidth
and low blocking probabilities. Such large calls
typically require coordination of geographically dstributed
facilities and people at the end systems. So it is
natural to book the network requirements ahead of their
actual use. In this paper, we present a new,
effective admission control algorithm for booking ahead
network services. The admission control is based on a
novel application of effective bandwidth theory to the time
domain. Systematic and comprehensive simulation experiments
provide understanding of how booking ahead affects call
blocking and network utilization, considering call
duration, number of links, bandwidth, routing, and
the mix of bookahead versus immediate arrival traffic.
Allowing some calls to book ahead radically redices their
chance of service denial, while allowing flexible and efficient
sharing of network resources with normal calls that
do not book ahead.
Lepidus. But small to greater matters must give way
Enobarbus. Not if the small come first
Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, Scene II