Prioritized resource allocation for stressed networks

Overloads that occur during times of network stress result in blocked acces s to all users, independent of importance. These overloads can occur becaus e of degraded resource availability or abnormally high demand. Public broad band networks must dynamically recognize some multimedia connections as hav ing greater importance than others and allocate resources accordingly. A ne w approach to connection admission control is proposed that uses an upper l imit policy to optimize the admission of connections based on the weighted sum of blocking across traffic classes. This results in a simple algorithm suitable for multimedia and packet networks. This work is also the first to demonstrate that the use of an upper limit policy is superior to tradition al approaches of adding extra capacity or partitioning capacity, both in te rms of the amount of resources required and sensitivity to load variations. An upper limit policy can also be deployed much faster when a large overlo ad occurs from a disaster event.