Over-provisioning centric network resource control in Future Internet systems

Envisioning to meet the expectations arising from the Future Internet, and specifically to provide efficient Quality of Service (QoS) support for multimedia multi-user sessions, the attempts by the research community have resulted in mechanisms such as Multi-User Aggregated Resource Allocation (MARA). The MARA mechanism adopts an over-provisioning centric strategy to control surplus class-based bandwidth reservations and aggregate IP multicast trees, which allows to significantly improve network performance through a signaling-constrained approach. The results of MARA have been promising, mainly because it drastically reduces signaling and processing overhead. Although MARA has emerged as a promising QoS control mechanism, it was designed exclusively for single-ingress scenarios, thus restricting it´s applicability in today´s and future networks that mostly adopt multi-ingress capabilities. Therefore, this paper proposes the Multi-User Aggregated Resource Allocation - Multi Ingress (MARA-MI), whose main extension can be found in a new architecture that is able to correlate aggregate IP multicast trees and to assist the adaptation of the over-reservation patterns in multi-ingress scenarios without the possibility of QoS violations and waste of resources occurrence. The overcoming of the main limitations of previous MARA, confirmed by results, qualifies MARA-MI as a promising tool for todays and future IP-based network systems.