A toolkit for delay guaranteed communications

In this paper, we report the design and implementation of a software suite called NetEx (short for Network Express) that can provide connection-oriented delay-guaranteed communication services at application level. With NetEx, user applications request connection set-up by specifying their traffic (using some standard traffic descriptors) and quality of service (e.g., delay bound). NetEx runs a connection admission control (CAC) algorithm to check if the new connection can be accepted. NetEx integrates network wide admission control with host run-time traffic control to facilitate application-to-application delay-guaranteed communication. The modular design and implementation of NetEx allows it to also serve as a software test-bed to experiment with different network management techniques. It is implemented on an ATM LAN