Efficient resource management for hard real-time communication over differentiated services architectures

We propose an efficient strategy for resource management for scalable QoS guaranteed real-time communication services. This strategy is based on sink trees, and is particularly well suited for differentiated-services based architectures. We first show that finding a set of sink-trees in a given network is NP-complete. Then we propose a heuristic algorithm that always efficiently produces a set of sink-trees for a given network. Sink-tree based resource management integrates routing and resource reservation along the routes, and therefore has a number of advantages over other resource management scheme, in terms of: admission probability, link resource utilization, flow set up latency, signaling overhead, and routing over-head. In this paper we show by simulation experiments that even for simple cases the sink-tree based approach shows excellent results in terms of admission probability