Adaptive admission control in a NGN service platform

Abstract

In NGN service-provisioning platforms the existence of an efficient and flexible admission control mechanism is essential for providing quality of service in a reliable and stable way, avoiding congestion scenarios caused by indiscriminate and uncontrolled service requests. The capability of modulating and regulating the rate of call acceptance, and provide service differentiation allow indirect control of the load submitted to the platform. This paper presents a service admission control solution that enables to differentiate, limit and modulate the rate by which service requests are submitted into a NGN service-provisioning platform. The solution is focused on providing a fair level of bandwidth sharing among service classes, in a configurable and dynamic way so that it can adapt the distribution by which service requests are served. To sustain the design goals of our solution, major scheduling disciplines and rate control mechanisms are here studied and compared in order to elect the more adequate components. The implemented solution was submitted to unit and charge tests; the results show its effectiveness and robustness in controlling and differentiating incoming service calls.