Resource Partitioning for Multi-Party Real-Time Communication

For real-time communication services to achieve widespread usage, it is important that the network's management be allowed to control the services effectively. An important management capability concerns resource partitioning, i.e., distributing the different resources available at any given server (network node or link) among a number of partitions, where the admission control and establishment computations for a given connection need to consider only the connections in the same partition, and are completely independent of the connections accepted in other partitions. Resource partitioning is useful for a number of applications, including the creation of virtual private subnetworks, and of mechanisms for advance reservation of real-time network services, fast establishment of real-time connections, and mobile computing with real-time communication. In previous work, we presented a scheme for resource partitioning in a guaranteed performance networking environment with EDD-based packet scheduling disciplines. We now present the results of our continuing research, giving admission control tests for resource partitioning for two additional scheduling disciplines, FIFO and RCSP, as well. We also simulate our resource partitioning scheme in a multi-party application scenario. Our simulations confirm that resource fragmentation losses due to resource partitioning are small, and that resource partitioning reduces the admission control computation overhead. A somewhat surprising result from the simulation experiments is that, under circumstances that arise naturally in multi-party communication scenarios, resource partitioning results in higher overall connection acceptance rate.

ICSI Technical Report TR-94-061

Technical Report