Distributed Admission Control for Heterogeneous Multicast with Bandwidth Guarantees
Sudeept Bhatnagar, Badri Nath, Arup A. Acharya · 2010
Abstract. Many group communication applications have real-time constraints. Since multicast serves as a natural framework for such applications, it is desirable to support quality of service (QoS) guarantees for multicast. Limiting the amount of processing inside the network core has been recognized as a key for any QoS solution to be scalable and accordingly any QoS solution for multicast should not require core routers to perform extensive per-flow operations. We propose an architecture to implement distributed admission control for multicast flows with heterogeneous user requirements while not requiring core routers to perform any admission control. Our admission control framework guarantees that a request is only admitted if there is sufficient bandwidth available and only requires the edge routers of a domain to take admission decisions. An intra-domain signaling mechanism is used in conjunction with the admission control framework to install the forwarding state inside the network core. We show that using our architecture, the requirements for both installing and maintaining the forwarding state in core routers, are similar to that in a best-effort multicast, thus, providing the QoS control plane functionality with negligible additional complexity inside network core. 1