Extending Connection Admission Control to the System and Application Level

We present a framework that attempts to extend the traditional network admission control function. It specifies an additional entity at the system and application level, which is responsible for admitting connections with specific guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. This decision is based on parameters provided by the end-user, the operational status and available resources at all three levels. As an example, we examine the application of the proposed framework at a HTTP server, where the user identifies its QoS requirements by www client rate in bps. The rate metric is a rather robust measure and easily obtained by measurements. It provides a familiar means to browser users to negotiate QoS and it is widely used by network Connection Admission Control mechanisms e.g. RSVP and ATM access. Thus, it can be used as an integrated QoS metric for network, system and application management.