ADAPTIVE CONNECTION ADMISSION CONTROL SCHEME FOR PACKET NETWORKS

An adaptive method and apparatus for regulating connection admission of traffic for networks, which includes a limiter that limits a volume of traffic admitted to a network through a connection admission control (CAC) procedure; and basing the connection admission control procedure at least in part on a pure measurement CAC that is solely based on measurements of actual traffic levels on the network. The connection admission control is based both on the pure measurement-based CAC and on a pure mathematical-based CAC that is solely dependent on user-supplied traffic parameters, thereby combining both types of the CAC to form a hybrid admission criterion. Where the network offers different services, managing link resources for CAC is effected by regulating the CAC procedure based on capacities assigned to service bandwidth pools that are defined for the different services offered by the network. The CAC procedure may take place on a virtual network (VN) environment.