Efficient Management and Packets Forwarding for Multimedia Flows

Well known requirements for handling multimedia flows in routers are resource reservation and fast packets forwarding. The former takes into account the quite stable and long lasting bandwidth occupation, whereas the latter takes into account the large number of packets routed along the same path. Many techniques have been proposed and standardized to face these requirements, but their application is often complex, expensive and sometimes limited by the need of agreements between network managers of the many networks and Autonomous Systems. This paper introduces IMFM (Integrated Multimedia Flows Management), an innovative, scalable, and extremely lightweight technique to provide routers deterministic and dynamic resource reservation and a fast forwarding table lookup. It is based on a distributed linked data structure that allows direct (searchless) access to entries in the routers’ tables, extending the resource reservation algorithm REBOOK. Unlike conventional virtual circuits, IMFM does not require any interaction with (nor change in) the underlying routing protocols and autonomously recovers from errors, faults and route changes. If information stored in its data structure becomes obsolete, packet handling is reverted to best-effort, lookup-driven forwarding, so that packets are never dropped nor misrouted. IMFM can be gradually deployed, providing a framework for congestion avoidance solutions and increasing the forwarding speed in IMFM-aware router even along partially IMFMunaware paths. IMFM has been fully implemented. Experiments have been designed to demonstrate its feasibility and the measured performance is reported and compared with existing techniques