The usage of advance reservation mechanisms in distributed multimedia applications

Distributed multimedia applications impose specific requirements concerning quality-of-service. To satisfy these requirements, the reservation of network and end system resources is necessary. Particularly for applications with relatively long duration and significant importance from a business point of view, it is desirable to do such reservations well in advance of the actual run-time. This way, the probability of resource availability can be increased, and network utilisation can be improved. Based on our design and implementation of a mechanism for resource reservation in advance (ReRA), this paper describes the use of this approach within dedicated application scenarios. In particular, we both address videoconferencing based on the MBone tools and video-on-demand services based on extended client/server protocols. For these scenarios, reservation requirements are derived and typical design trade-offs concerning advance reservation mechanisms are discussed. From a practical point of view, the mapping of advance reservations onto either RSVP or onto direct ATM connections is outlined.