Impact of non-Poisson arrival sequences for call admission algorithms with and without delay

New networking technologies such as ATM can carry a wide variety of traffic over a single digital network. Since some of the services depend on bandwidth guarantees, the network should employ a call admission algorithm to limit congestion. Call admission includes making intelligent decisions about whether to accept a call, and if so, when to schedule it, and how to route it. Challenges in the design of such algorithms include high bandwidth requirements and the bursty nature of call arrivals. Empirical studies of traffic measurements from a variety of networks have previously demonstrated that characteristics of network traffic are non-Poisson. In particular, connection arrivals are much burstier than Poisson processes would predict; they actually show evidence of self-similarity behavior. In this paper we show that bursty traffic poses a significant challenge to existing call admission algorithms. To cope with bursty traffic and high bandwidth demands we suggest algorithms that may delay calls