Patent ID: 7289527

Claim:
A method for admission control of requests for a network service, said method comprising: receiving requests R, having associated parameters, for the network service; estimating system capacity consumed by received requests R that are admitted for system servicing; and selectively accepting or rejecting each received request R according to an admission control criterion, wherein the admission control criterion is based upon at least parameters associated with each received request R, spare system capacity, estimated as total system capacity less total system capacity estimated to be consumed by admitted requests, an estimate of expected requests, and parameters associated with said expected requests, determining if two received requests R collide based upon whether said two received requests can be serviced using the spare system capacity; defining a decision horizon T in which a received request R can be serviced; applying an available capacity criterion at each time step t in the decision horizon T; admitting a received request R only if the received request R meets the available capacity criterion at each time step t in the decision horizon T; predicting expected requests R D that may arrive during the decision horizon T; and pre-reserving capacity for selected expected requests R D , wherein capacity is pre-reserved for expected requests R D which satisfy a predetermined profitability criterion, and wherein the predetermined profitability criterion is satisfied if an estimated probability of an expected request arriving and terminating during a remaining time in the decision horizon T after the expected colliding request R D is serviced, multiplied by a sum of reward and penalty of an expected request exceeds a difference in the rewards of the received request R and the expected colliding request R D .