An integrated admission control scheme for the delivery of streaming media

Quality of service (QoS) assurance is a major concern in media-on-demand (MoD) systems. Admission control is one of the most important issues that need to be addressed for QoS assurance. Also, smoothing is a basic technique for the media server to improve its bandwidth and buffer utilization. However, existing approaches cannot achieve the best resource utilization because (1) they cannot fully utilize the time-varying buffer spaces available at both server and client sides due to the separation of admission control and smoothing processes, and (2) the computing time is unacceptable for media of long duration. In this paper, we formulate the admission control as an integer programming problem and propose several heuristic methods for solving the problem. Specially, we introduce an efficient scheme, called batched admission (BA) scheme, which integrates admission control, transmission rate smoothing, and batching, to achieve best resource utilization with guaranteed QoS. Experimental studies show that the BA scheme outperforms existing approaches.