Heuristic Approaches to Service Level Agreements in Packet Networks

Abstract

Real-time multimedia applications on the Internet such as video and audio streaming, video conferencing, and online collaborations are expected to become increasingly popular. In order to guarantee effective support of these applications, we must be able to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees such as network bandwidth and end-to-end delay, by incorporating session routing and resource reservation in admission control. In this work, we present the Utility Model, which provides an optimal allocation of resources for admission control while meeting the QoS requirements of admitted users’ sessions. We describe previous heuristics to solve the Utility Model. These heuristics, though, are not suitable for larger networks due to their computation complexity, resulting in real-time decision-making and scalability issues. We are proposing a new concept to solve the Utility Model problem using a modified version of the Multicommodity Flow algorithm. This heuristic has improved computational complexity, and hence is capable of solving the Utility Model problem in lower overall execution time. This implies that admission control, which requires real-time solution of the Model, can be extended to larger networks.