Evaluation of resource sharing benefits

    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.  We previously
presented resource sharing, a new approach that exploits known
relationships between related connections to allow network resources to
be shared without sacrificing well-defined guarantees.  Resource
sharing is very important for large conferences with a bounded number
of concurrent speakers, resource requirements do not increase with the
number of potential speakers.  In this paper, we evaluate resource
sharing benefits by analysis and by simulation. Results show that
resource sharing leads to a large gain in the connection acceptance
rate, and a significant reduction in the computational overhead
associated with admission control.