Call admission: A new approach to quality of service

Quality of service guarantees are an important and much discussed aspect of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network design. However, there is no standard definition of quality of service. Moreover, some often-used criteria seem quite crude. We consider call admission to a bufferless ATM multiplexer with on/off sources. A new criterion for a guarantee on average cell loss is proposed. This criterion represents the quality of service from the point of view of the user, and is thus more reliable. We calculate the optimal policy that minimizes blocking subject to the guarantee, when there is only one type of user. The measure of cell-loss we propose is applicable to a wide range of models. It gives rise to a mathematical programming formulation, which we derive explicitly for our case.