Fair and optimal dynamic admission control of elastic flows

The task of assigning part of the forwarding capability of a router to different flows, usually called admission control, is considered and an algorithm to handle the requests is developed. The idea is to admit not only the acceptance and the rejection answers but also a third kind of answer that occurs when there is no available share of the resource at the instant of the request but there may be a quote of resource available in a determined time-window in the future, provided that the active flows are suitably decreased. The algorithm guarantees both the fair occupancy of the resource and the optimality of its usage. Moreover, the only information on which the algorithm relies is the number of flows, and for each one, the minimum bandwidth needed and the desired bandwidth.