Mobile agent based online bandwidth allocation scheme for multimedia communication

The allocation of bandwidth for multimedia traffic poses a technical challenge due to bursty and isochronous nature of applications. We propose a mobile agent based approach for bandwidth allocation in multimedia communication. It is based on the the network congestion monitored by the agents at the clients. The mobile agent hosted by the server will allocate bandwidth online to the applications within the requested range at regular intervals. Also, it keeps the aggregated bandwidth below the link bandwidth of server and clients. The approach reduces the network control traffic used in traditional online bandwidth allocation policies. The scheme is simulated and its performance is evaluated in terms of several parameters, like, bandwidth utilization, application rejection, agent response time, and agent migrations. The simulation results show that the use of agents increase flexibility and efficiency in end-to-end bandwidth allocation and operate asynchronously. The flexibility in using this technology is that, the allocation policies can be changed, customized and implemented easily