Intelligently Balancing Per-Hop Delay Allocation to Improve Network Utilization

Delay guarantees are critical to real-time applications. To ensure the end-to-end delay guarantee of a flow, the previous approaches usually statically divide the end-to-end delay requirement into per-hop delay requirements. However, such static resource allocations may cause unbalanced usage in a network, limit the total number of sessions that can be accommodated, and result in low network utilization. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic allocation adjustment (DAA) approach to evenly spread traffic over flow paths and related links, and improve the system utilization. Our simulation results show that DAA is able to significantly increase the total number of flows admitted; it reduces the average link reservations, decreases the total resource usage per flow, and balances link loads.