Comments on the performance of measurement-based admission control algorithms

Relaxed real time services that do not provide guaranteed loss rates or delay bounds are of considerable interest in the Internet, since these services can achieve higher utilization than hard real time services while still providing adequate service to adaptive real-time applications. Achieving this higher level of utilization depends on an admission control algorithm that does not rely on worst-case bounds to guide its admission decisions. Measurement-based admission control is one such approach, and several measurement-based admission control algorithms have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we use simulations to compare the performance of several of these algorithms. We find that all of them achieve nearly the same utilization for a given packet loss rate, and that none of them are capable of accurately meeting loss targets.