Improving node behaviour in a QoS control environment by means of load-dependent resource redistributions in LANs

An important means to guarantee an acceptable quality of service in networks with real-time communication requirements is the reservation of resources at connection setup time. However, such reserved resources, e.g. transmission bandwidth, may be unused as a consequence of the variations in the actual resource demands. Therefore, a more efficient resource utilization is possible if communicating stations or end-users dynamically hand over some of the free resources temporarily to the other communication partners, e.g. of a “broadcast network”. This paper concentrates on two fundamental problems of such a demand-based sharing of resources: on the one hand, estimation of the current resource requirement on the basis of load measurements is investigated and, on the other hand, we elaborate efficient algorithms for resource sharing respecting real-time requirements. The algorithms proposed for load estimation and for resource sharing are evaluated analytically with respect to their efficiency for worst-case, average-case and realistic load scenarios. Our approach suggested for resource and traffic management allows one to achieve significantly better utilization of network resources. Copyright c © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.