Time-aware admission control on top of time-unaware network infrastructures

Users conceive advance negotiation as the most natural way to subscribe to a service with quality guarantees. Regrettably, the existing network infrastructures are unable to process requests involving time as a Quality of Service parameter. Rather than designing a new integrated approach to time-aware resource management, in this paper we show how to build time-aware admission control on top of existing time-unaware solutions. Reuse of current achievements in the field of admission control is made possible by exploiting the orthogonality, which exists between the time dimension and the resource plane. Decomposition of functions and separation of concerns are the key aspects of our algorithm. The approach and the algorithm are presented in a formal way, and then analysed by means of practical examples. A scalability analysis is also conducted, which helps set the limits of applicability of our approach. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.