Project Summary
Adaptive Admission Control for Broadband Communication
Timothy X Brown
University of Colorado, Boulder

This research will formulate and develop a method for controlling the
traffic carried on a broadband communication network; specifically for
the case of carrying diverse real traffic sources with difficult to
model and analyze queueing properties; inter-source correlations;
slowly varying statistical properties; diverse heterogeneous source
types; misspecified traffic descriptors; and inadvertent network
traffic shaping. We treat the case when the traffic sources are given
quality of service guarantees and the goal is to maximize utilization
of network resources. The method is based on statistical classification
techniques that use historical data as to what were acceptable
combinations of carried traffic and what were not. It is expected that
the method will perform well with most if not all of the above
properties of real data sources unlike the proposed methods to date
which either distinctly miss quality of service targets, utilize the
network at a fraction of its capacity, or are only applied to one or

Technical problems addressed include efficient representation and
storage of historical data; choice and modification strategy of
classifier model; noise on the data; confidence intervals on decisions;
directed and undirected exploration of the decision space; filtering
out uninformative data; and implementations. The effectiveness and
advantages of the methods developed will be experimentally tested
against alternative methods on simple models and real traffic traces
such as ethernet data; variable rate video; and ISDN traffic.

The techniques developed here will be central to solving modern
broadband networks problems such as routing, provisioning, and network
design.

The teaching will strive for a broad telecommunication engineering
education that includes all the industry drivers of standards,
economics, regulatory/policy, existing and coming services, in addition
to the underlying technology. This will prepare engineers as more
effective contributors in industry and conversely bring more diverse
backgrounds into engineering. From a position as a joint appointment
between the Electrical and Computer Engineering department and the
Interdisciplinary Telecommunications masters program, this goal will be
achieved through an undergraduate telecommunication curriculum
currently under development in ECE, developing ties with the many
computer and communications companies in the area, and development of
"hands-on" software experiments based on simulators developed for the
research.