Call admission control for video phone applications

Abstract

The increase in network capacities has led to the feasibility of real-time video applications such as video telephony. Such applications can use enormous amounts of bandwidth and must be carefully managed to avoid depleting network resources. One such bandwidth management approach utilizes router support to effectively control the video bandwidth usage [Hugh M. Smith and Matt W. Mutka, November 2000]. This protocol allows real-time video applications to fairly share network links and limits the bandwidth used by these applications without causing packet loss. However, this basic control algorithm does not include a mechanism to provide call admission control (CAC). This paper proposes two statistical based CAC algorithms. These algorithms attempt to minimize the impact of the CAC on the user's video quality, network utilization and router processing while providing dynamic bandwidth control without packet loss. We provide simulation results of these two algorithms and compare their performance with respect to bandwidth utilization, number of calls rejected, and scalability. These simulations show that our algorithms effectively control the admission of new video sessions.