Problems of Elastic Traffic Admission Control in an HTTP Scenario

Admission control for elastic traffic has been advocated in order to maintain performance (i.e. ensure a minimum bandwidth) for each admitted flow and to avoid unnecessary traffic in the network due to retransmissions of packets or even whole transfers after a temporary overload situation. This paper aims at indicating problems of admission control for elastic traffic on a per-TCP-connection basis is problematic in the context of Web traffic: (i) A TCP connection is not equivalent to a transfer. (ii) It is the variance in connection volumes rather than the connection arrival rate that causes most overload situations. (iii) From an application point of view, the target of maintaining performance for admitted flows under high offered load is not met.

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