Abstract
An important aspect of providing QoS to realtime multimedia applications is QoS provisioning. QoS provisioning consists of determining a path through the network, which has adequate resources to satisfy the QoS requirements of a connection with global efficiency in network resource utilization, and then reserving resources along this path for the duration of the connection. However, since performance degradation is inevitable due to the weakening or the failure of a network element, provisioning alone is not sufficient to ensure QoS for the entire duration of the connection. Hence, an equally important aspect of providing QoS to multimedia applications is QoS monitoring, so that performance degradation can be anticipated before it occurs or detected immediately upon occurrence. This can trigger provisioning of resources along an alternate suitable path to which the connection can be rerouted. Since QoS provisioning, monitoring and alternate provisioning are all necessary to provide QoS to a connection, they should be treated in a unified fashion rather than treating them separately as in the current literature. In this paper we propose a novel network architecture, which offers a comprehensive integrated solution to the problems of QoS provisioning, monitoring, and alternate provisioning. We also discuss a key design parameter in alternate provisioning, describe an alternate provisioning scheme for the proposed architecture, and analyze the efficiency of the scheme for two commonly used network domain topologies.