Dynamic management of guaranteed-performance multimedia connections

Most of the solutions proposed to support real-time (i.e., guaranteed performance) communication services in packet-switching networks adopt a connection-oriented and reservation-oriented approach. In such an approach, resource allocation and route-selection decisions are made before the start of the communication on the basis of resource availability and real-time network load at that time, and are usually kept for the duration of the communication. This ratherstatic resource-management approach has certain limitations. It does not take into account (a) the dynamics of the communicating clients; (b) the dynamics of the network state; and (c) the tradeoff between quality of service and network availability, thus affecting theavailability andflexibility of the real-time network services. Availability is the ability of the network to accommodate as many real-time clients as possible, while flexibility is the ability to adapt the real-time services to the changing state of the network and the client demands. In this paper, we present the dynamic connection management (DCM) scheme, which addresses these issues by providing the network with the capability of dynamically modifying the performance parameters and the routes of any existing real-time connection. With this capability, DCM can be used to increase the availability and flexibility of the guaranteed-performance service offered to the clients.