Quality-of-Service Negotiation in a Real-Time Communication Network

			Jean Ramaekers and Giorgio Ventre

		International Computer Science Institute,
			      Berkeley, CA
			       April 1992


In the recent years new protocols and algorithms have been proposed to
guarantee performance and reliability in exchanging data in real-time
communication networks, and new services have been presented to allow
cooperative office work, distributed conferencing, etc.  Less
attention has been paid to how applications and, more generally,
clients of real-time communication services can interact with the
network in order to specify and negotiate the quality-of-service of a
connection.  We believe that this problem is going to become a key
issue for the success of future distributed systems, since it affects
both client and network performances. In this paper we present a new
mechanism for the establishment of real-time connections in a
quality-of-service network developed for the Tenet real-time protocol
suite.  By improving the information exchanged between the network and
the clients, the model allows to reduce the complexity and the time
required to establish a real-time connection, and increases the
network utilization.  Additionally, we introduced a new class of
real-time communication service to support adaptive
quality-of-service, in order to enhance the possibilities of the
network to face congestion situations.