Call admission and resource reservation for multicast sessions

Many multicast applications, including audio and video, require quality of service (QoS) guarantees from the network. Hence, multicast admission control and resource reservation procedures will be needed. In this paper we present a general framework for admission control and resource reservation for multicast sessions. Within this framework, efficient and practical algorithms that aim to efficiently utilize network resources are developed. The problem of admission control is decomposed into several subproblems that include: the division of end-to-end QoS requirements into local QoS requirements, the mapping of local QoS requirements into resource requirements, and the reclaiming of the resources allocated in excess. These are solved independently of each other yielding a set of mechanisms and policies that can be used to provide admission control and resource reservation for multicast connection establishment. The resource allocation algorithms we consider specifically accommodate receiver heterogeneity (in both end-to-end and per-hop QoS requirements) by reserving necessary and sufficient resources for a multicast session. An application of these algorithms in the context of packetized voice multicast connections over the Mbone is provided to illustrate their applicability