Abstract

High-end networking applications such as e-commerce, multimedia, distributed data analysis and advanced collaborative environments feature demanding end-to-end quality of service (QoS) requirements. Due to the heterogeneity exhibited by the Internet, a route from source to destination for such a flow may not be available which is comprised exclusively of QoS supporting path segments. Hence the flow must traverse one or more non-QoS path segments referred to here as reservation gaps. In this paper we study the problem of reservation gaps and their impact on QoS and present a solution to address the deficiencies caused by such gaps, using an active network approach based on the mobile agent paradigm. Furthermore, to improve the reliability in path selection and to minimise the influence of reservation gaps along the path of a QoS flow, we propose two routing algorithms, the most reliable shortest path (MS-R) algorithm and the shortest - most reliable path (S-MR) algorithm, that select paths with the minimum number of reservation gaps. The active network based solution we propose works autonomously and scales to large networks such as the Internet. We demonstrate the advantages of such a solution using simulations which compares operational characteristics of QoS flows when traversing non-managed and actively managed reservation gaps. We also demonstrate the benefits of employing a routing algorithm such as MR-S or S-MR that accounts for reservation gaps in place of conventional shortest-path routing algorithms.