An admission control framework for applications with variable consumption rates in client-pull architectures

Highly interactive multimedia applications require variable data rates during their presentation. Current admission control mechanisms do not address the variable data rate requirements appropriately for the following reasons: (1) classical admission control mechanisms are based on the server-push approach, where the required data rate has to be estimated in advance, and (2) worst-case resource reservation is not economic. Client-pull models are more appropriate to serve these kinds of applications. At the current state, there are no suitable mechanisms that support admission control in client-pull architectures at the server. In this paper, a session-oriented framework for admission control is introduced that is based on two steps: (1) the admission of new clients and (2) the scheduling of the single requests of admitted clients to balance the load. The goal of this approach is to improve the server utilization and the Quality of Service. Evaluation studies demonstrate the benefit of the framework.