Advance bandwith reservation algorithms in communication networks: Performance evaluation

The need for Quality of Service (QoS) support in the network is obvious. Several QoS aware network management systems have been developed in order to make multimedia applications, such as Video on Demand, available over the network with acceptable quality. In response to a user request with the desired QoS, most of these systems return an acceptance or a simple rejection depending on whether there are available resources for reservation for the request. This implies that a second attempt of the user cannot take advantage of information obtained through the first request. To overcome this limitation, a scheme, called NAFUR, was developed; it allows computing the QoS that can be supported for the time the service request is made, and at certain later times carefully chosen. Indeed, NAFUR produces a list of alternative proposals with delayed starting times or degraded QoS to be presented to the user. In this paper we define, implement, and evaluate two algorithms that can be used to compute the list of proposals. The first algorithm is based on the original NAFUR proposal computation (PC) algorithm while the second algorithm is based on the K-Nearest-Neighbors technique.