A scheme for real-time channel establishment in wide-area networks

Multimedia communication involving digital audio and/or digital video has rather strict delay requirements. A real-time channel is defined as a simplex connection between a source and a destination characterized by parameters representing the performance requirements of the client. A study is made of the feasibility of providing real-time services on a packet-switched store-and-forward wide-area network with general topology. A description is given of a scheme for the establishment of channels with deterministic or statistical delay bounds, and the results of the simulation experiments run to evaluate it are presented. The results are judged encouraging: the approach satisfies the guarantees even in worst case situations, uses the network´s resources to a fair extent, and efficiently handles channels with a variety of offered load and burstiness characteristics. Also, the packet transmission overhead is quite low, and the channel establishment overhead is small enough to be acceptable in most practical cases