This invention addresses the demand on quality of service (QoS) and bandwidth limitations in a communications wireless network. The approach supports transmissions of data streams with QoS requirements, such as minimum through-put or maximum delay. It adapts to the changing characteristics of the transmission medium allowing networks to support bounded delay flows efficiently by use of a polling manager and a resource manager, which determine whether a flow can be accepted by a given network element.  The resource manager provides an admission control procedure that prevents admission of sessions that cannot be supported by the system and allocates network resources needed to support admitted sessions.