Scalable resource reservation for multi-party real-time communication

        Amit Gupta, Wingwai Howe, Mark Moran and Quyen Nguyen 

			Abstract

Current approaches to supporting real-time communication allocate
network resources either to individual connections, or to aggregates of
connections, based on type of traffic, protocol, or performance
requirements.  The first approach provides well-defined performance
guarantees that are independent of other network traffic.  The second
approach may achieve higher utilization of network resources, but the
expected performance is less well-defined since it is dependent on the
behavior of unrelated (possibly unknown) connections.  Resource sharing
is a new approach that exploits known relationships between related
connections to allow network resources to be shared without sacrificing
well-defined guarantees.  Most importantly, for large conferences with
a bounded number of concurrent speakers, resource requirements do not
increase with the number of potential speakers.  Therefore, resource
sharing is an important tool for providing real-time performance
guarantees for large conferences.  This paper presents a fully
distributed technique for using resource sharing to provide real-time
guarantees in a general internetworking environment.  The technique is
described in the context of its implementation in the next generation
of the Tenet real-time protocols.  However, the underlying principles
are equally applicable to other communication paradigms and
techniques.  A companion report presents the results of simulation
experiments; the simulations show that resource sharing leads to large
gains in connection acceptance rates and a significant reduction in
computational overhead associated with admission control for real-time
communication.