Connection admission control for differentiating priority traffic on public networks

The public network has traditionally been unable to adequately deal with defense and disaster recovery communications, because overloads that occur during crises cause degraded resource access to all users, no matter how important. For public broadband networks to be effective for defense and disaster recovery multimedia communications, they must dynamically recognize some connections as having greater importance than others and allocate resources accordingly. A new approach to connection admission control is proposed that uses an upper limit policy to optimize the admission of connections based on the weighted sum of blocking across traffic classes. This optimization approach can be used for arbitrarily large networks and numbers of traffic classes and results in a very simple algorithm that could be implemented on standard network hardware. This work is also the first to demonstrate that the use of an upper limit policy is superior to traditional approaches of adding extra capacity or partitioning capacity, both in the amount of resources required and in sensitivity to load variations. An upper limit policy is also shown to be much faster to implement where a large overload occurs from a disaster event