Performance modeling of advance resource reservation service

We study the performance of advance resource reservation in a network environment with emphasis placed on multi-party conferencing. An immediate acknowledgment model is considered, where a reservation request is processed as soon as it is submitted. The set of links that interconnect the conference participants is determined by a routing function. Routing decisions can be affected by the way link costs are assigned. We use simulation to study the performance difference of two types of link cost functions: constant and exponential. Results that show the tradeoff between resource usage and load balancing are presented. The residual capacities (or capacities not reserved) can be used to support other services, e.g., best-effort traffic. A simple model is used to study the impact of variations in residual capacities at the various links on the end-to-end delay of best-effort traffic