Signaling in IP cell-switching

This paper deals with a proposal for IP cell-switching. This proposal is based on a fixed IPv6 packet length and a label-switching technology with different qualities of service. The label is provided through the flow label field of the IPv6 packet. The POS (Packet Over SONET) technology is used at the physical layer. A virtual path has to be established before sending the flow of IP cells. A signaling protocol is mandatory to set-up and to reserve the resource necessary to ensure the quality of service requested by the user. We analyze the existing reservation protocols that use a default path. Indeed, it should be more appropriate to choose a path providing the QoS negotiated between the sender and the receiver before reserving some resources. Most of the routing protocols determine the best path at the set-up time. However, this best path could become a congested path some time after. So, splitting the flow over multiple paths could give better performance than using just one path. Finally, we claim that RSVP could work as a signaling protocol at the basis of a resource reservation scheme in a label-switching environment. Moreover, this environment is well-adapted to the multicast paradigm