Scalable per-flow resource management for large hierarchical networks

Abstract

In this paper we present a new resource management architecture, which provides end-to-end QoS guarantees to individual flows in a large, hierarchical network, such as the global Internet. This framework provides exact reservation and guaranteed resources to individual flows and, therefore, has the same expressive power as the IntServ model, while at the same time manages to overcome the scalability problem of IntServ. Furthermore, in addition to regulating per-flow resource allocation, the proposed architecture enables per-flow accounting in a secure manner. We are particularly interested in building scalable per-flow resource management architecture for the Internet, as it is known that aggregate traffic based services provided with DiffServ solutions have lower flexibility, utilization and performance assurance when compared to the services that can be provided with per-flow mechanisms.