A scalable architecture for providing deterministic guarantees

The Internet community has proposed the integrated services architecture (Intserv) and the signaling protocol RSVP to provide deterministic guarantees (bandwidth, delay and jitter) to individual flows. However, experience with practical systems has revealed the severe scalability problems of the Intserv model due to the amount of routing and reservation state that is required to he maintained in the routers. A natural approach to improving scalability of the Intserv architecture is through a reduction of the number of states in the routers by using aggregated flow state instead of per-flow state. We present a novel architecture that uses very few states in the routers, while still providing the deterministic guarantees of the Intserv model