INTRODUCTION

Real-time flows have quality of service requirements that translate to requiring some minimal level of resource allocation, for example some minimal bandwidth. For packet-based networks such as the Internet, the minimal quality of service level for many real-time flows also typically involves requiring small packet-loss rates and small queuing delays to minimize latency.

We are motivated by audio and video applications that have an interactive element or tight latency bound, where the minimal requirement is necessary. Admission control is the obvious way to ensure such flows get an acceptable level of performance from the network, assuring the quality of service of existing flows by refusing admission to others.

Traditionally some form of signaling mechanism is used, for example RSVP, which makes reservations along a path. However there are scalability questions associated with this approach to consider end-point admission control, or distributed admission control, where the end-system probes the network at some rate, receives some information back from the network in terms of packet-loss or ECN marks and bases the entry decision on this information.