A SCHEME FOR REAL-TIME CHANNEL ESTABLISHMENT IN WIDE-AREA NETWORKS

Multimedia communication involving digital audio and/or digital video has rather strict delay requirements. A real-time channel is defined in this paper as a simplex connection between a source and a destination characterized by parameters representing the performance requirements of the client. A real-time service is capable of creating real-time channels on demand and guaranteeing their performance. These guarantees often take the form of lower bounds on the bandwidth allocated to a channel and upper bounds on the delays to be experienced by a packet on the channel. In this paper, we study the feasibility of providing real-time services on a packet-switched store-and-forward wide-area network with general topology. We describe a scheme for the establishment of channels with deterministic or statistical delay bounds, and present the results of the simulation experiments we ran to evaluate it. The results are encouraging: our approach satisfies the guarantees even in worst case situations, uses the network’s resources to a fair extent, and efficiently handles channels with a variety of offered load and burstiness characteristics. Also, the packet transmission overhead is quite low, and the channel establishment overhead is small enough to be acceptable in most practical cases. © 1990 IEEE