There has been an increasing need of highly predictable, timely, and dependable communication services with QoS guarantees on an end-to-end basis either for embedded real-time applications or for multimedia-integrated distributed control. In particular, the RSVP Working Group of the IETF has developed a resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) protocol to provide receiver-initiated setup of resource reservations for unicast/multicast data flows. RSVP supports receiver-initiated, fixed/shared reservation styles under the assumption that a underlying routing protocol is available to provide unicast routes/multicast trees with sufficient resources to maintain adequate QoS. Unfortunately, most of the currently operational multicast routing protocols do not explicitly support QoS (in the form of end-to-end delay bound, end-to-end inter-destination delay jitter bound, and minimum guaranteed bandwidth). The goal of the proposed research is thus to develop and evaluate a QoS routing framework and its associated admission control, member join/leave procedures, and information update procedures, to allow deployment of QoS routing capabilities in core-based multicast routing protocols. The proposed research is a combination of two synergistic components: establishment of theoretical base for, and development of, all the component schemes in a well-defined analytic framework and their validation with software system building and experiments. We will pursue this research by (i) devising effective admission tests to verify whether or not a multicast group member may join the multicast tree, while not violating existing QoS guarantees to other on-tree members; (ii) investigating the minimum set of information/state required for admission tests in the context of the controlled-load service and the guaranteed QoS service with various reservation styles as proposed in RSVP; (iii) developing (with consideration of the scalability issue) effective information update and state refresh procedures that can be read ily integrated with the soft state refresh echanism that exist in most multicast routing protocols that exploit the soft state concept; and (iv) building an experimental software using the GateD multicast source codes distributed by Merit Network, Inc., defining and implementing a rich, well-defined interface with RSVP (which may require minor changes in RSRR, the routing interface for RSVP), and developing application level libraries to exploit the proposed services to provide a suite of multicast services with different levels of QoS. For more information, please refer to the project web page (http://eewww.eng.ohio-state.edu/drcl/grants/qosr98/). On providing quality-of-service control for core-based multicast routing. Attachment Converted: C:EUDORAATTACHform1239.ps Attachment Converted: C:EUDORAATTACHform1239.p
