Network algorithms and protocol for multimedia servers
INFOCOM'96 Proceedings of the Fifteenth annual joint conference of the IEEE computer and communications societies conference on The conference on computer communications - Volume 3
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In this paper, we present a network service specifically designed for multimedia servers. By coupling a histogram-based traffic characterization with an admission control algorithm, it enables the network to provide heterogeneous statistical QoS guarantees to clients. To meet these guarantees, we propose an overload control algorithm and protocol that exploits the regularity and predictability in traffic to provide heterogeneous QoS while completely eliminating packet losses in the network. Specifically, it: (1) detects congestion in the network prior to its occurrence, (2) allocates bandwidth to competing sources based on their QoS guarantees, and (3) transmits feedback packets to the sources indicating the rate allocations. By ensuring that the feedback is received by the sources sufficiently prior to overload occurrence, the protocol enables the sources to employ application specific procedures to adjust their transmission rates so as to conform to the rate allocations, thereby eliminating any packet losses in the network. The key contribution of our protocol lies in combining open-loop and feedback-based control to: (1) provide heterogeneous QoS to clients in networking environments consisting of switches that may not have any scheduling support; and (2) migrate the functionality of discarding packets, in the event of congestion, to the sources which understand the semantics of the data. The protocol is efficient, makes very few assumptions about the underlying network, is realizable on current switching hardware (supporting FCFS scheduling), and is completely integrated with the architecture of a multimedia server.