Abstract In this paper, the main schemes of connection admission control (CAC) in ATM networks are briefly overviewed especially the principle of dynamic bandwidth allocation. Then the fair share of the bandwidth among different traffic sources is analyzed based on cooperative game model. A CAC scheme combining genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize the bandwidth-delay-product formed utilization function that ensures the fair share of accepting/rejecting the incoming calls is proposed. Simulation results show that our scheme ensures fairness of the shared bandwidth to different traffic sources.