Scalable Architecture for Providing Per-flow Bandwidth Guarantees

Despite numerous efforts, the problem of providing perflow Quality of Service in a scalable manner still remains an active area of research. This paper introduces a scalable architecture for support of per-flow bandwidth guarantees, called the Bandwidth Distribution Scheme (BDS). The BDS maintains aggregate flow information in the network core and distributes this information among boundary nodes as needed. Based on the feedback from the network core the boundary nodes dynamically adjust resource allocations of individual flows. The BDS architecture consists of three main components: the admission control, the resource distribution mechanism, and the protocol for distributing the aggregate flow requirements in the network. This paper describes components of the BDS architecture and illustrates how they operate together to achieve scalable per-flow QoS. KEY WORDS Quality of service, bandwidth distribution, network feedback, resource allocation 1