Routing for Supporting Real-Time Applications in High-Speed Networks

The rapid development and deployment of high-speed networks in recent years have given rise to many new distributed real-time applications such as videoconferencing, teleteaching, video-on-demand, computer visualization, etc. This dissertation studies the routing problems for supporting these applications.

The goals of routing for supporting real-time applications involving audio/video traffic should be computing paths (or multicast trees for the case of multiple destinations) that satisfy the given Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of the applications while managing the network resources efficiently. In this dissertation, the following new routing algorithms are proposed:

• A distributed delay-constrained unicast routing algorithm;
• two efficient centralized delay-constrained multicast routing algorithms;
• a genetic algorithm that computes delay-constrained multicast trees additionally with the ability to make tradeoffs between the multicast tree cost and the inter-destination delay variation or between the tree cost and the end-to-end delay;
• a distributed delay-constrained dynamic multicast routing algorithm.

Supporting real-time applications in high-speed networks requires reservation of resources. Since network resources are limited, efficient routing strategy and admission control are needed. In the past, much effort has been concentrated on circuit-switched complete topology networks (e.g. telecommunication networks) under the assumption that the arrival pattern of call requests can be described by probabilistic models with known parameters. A new routing and admission control algorithm based on the shortest path and the concept of competitive analysis for general topology high-speed networks and for the case where there is no advance knowledge of traffic patterns is proposed in the last part of the dissertation. Simulation results show that the proposed routing and admission control scheme has very good performance regarding call rejection probability and network throughput.

The routing problem in VP-based ATM networks and the issues of QoS-based routing in the Internet are also addressed in the dissertation.

For a copy of the dissertation, send a message (including ISBN 3-8265-4832-9) to Shaker Verlag.