Abstract
In traditional advance reservation (AR) service, resources were reserved for fixed scheduled periods at the time requests were admitted. When overtimes occurred, because of the reservation timeout, connections would be forced to terminate. For Internet AR applications like sports event casting and conference meetings such service disruption would be unfortunate and undesired for the viewers and participants. Further, taking into account that overtimes are often known almost at the last minute of the pre-scheduled period, even if a connection extension request is submitted the probability that it is successful is unpredictable depending on the network load. In this paper, we study the problem of admission control and resource management for the AR service with uncertain service duration. An innovative multi-stage two-leg admission control and bandwidth management scheme is proposed. New performance measures - service quality indexes and reservation cost function are also defined for AR service. Through simulations, we show that the proposed scheme successfully provides service users a more predictive, affirmative service guarantee than conventional reservation schemes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.