A separation principle between scheduling and admission control for broadband switching

A framework for joint scheduling and admission control in broadband switching systems based on a principle of separation between these two levels of control is developed. It is shown that an admission control strategy can be tailored to a particular mix of traffic by using high-level information from the scheduler. This principle is presented in the context of asynchronous time-sharing (ATS) in which explicit guarantees of cell-level and call-level quality of service (QOS) are given to several traffic classes. The separation principle allows the formulation of an optimal admission control policy that maximizes the expected system utility and maintains all QOS guarantees. Several heuristic admission control policies are considered and compared with the optimal policy. The admissible load region is introduced as a means of quantifying the capacity of a switch under the QOS constraints at the cell and call levels. Numerical calculations for a single MAGNET II switching node carrying two classes of real-time traffic are used to illustrate the effects of different scheduling and admission control policies on both the expected utility and the admissable load region