Resource reservation in advance in heterogeneous networks with partial ATM infrastructures

Resource reservation in advance (ReRA) enables scheduling and allocation of resources at an early stage in time. This way, the availability of resources can actually be guaranteed for the point in time when the resources are needed. As opposed to that, current reservation protocols such as RSVP perform an “immediate” reservation without advance scheduling. They can therefore suffer shortage of resources with subsequent rejection of applications. This paper describes our new approach for providing resource reservation in advance in ATM networks. As a foundation, we first present experiences of IPng and RSVP over ATM. Based on this work, we then discuss major design issues of an appropriate ReRA solution. Important aspects are the signalling model for ReRA, the admission control strategy, the duration of connections, and various other time-related parameters. We also discuss our ongoing implementation of ReRA as an extension of RSVP and outline directions for future research in this area