The Tenet Real-Time Protocol Suite: Design, Implementation, and Experiences1

Many future applications will require guarantees on network performance, such as bounds on throughput, delay, delay jitter, and reliability. To address this need, the Tenet Group at the University of California at Berkeley has designed, simulated, and implemented a suite of network protocols to support real-time channels (network connections with mathematically provable performance guarantees). The protocols, which constitute the prototype Tenet Real-Time Protocol Suite (Suite 1), run on a packet-switching internetwork, and can coexist with the popular Internet Suite. We rely on the use of connection-oriented communication, admission control, and channel rate control. This protocol suite is the first complete set of communication protocols that can transfer real-time streams with guaranteed quality in packet-switching internetworks. Our initial development was done on a local-area FDDI network. We have since installed our protocols on the experimental wide-area internetwork of Project Sequoia 2000, where they have been running for several months. We have performed a number of experiments and demonstrations in this environment using continuous-media loads (particularly video). Our results show that our approach is both feasible and practical to build, and that it can successfully provide performance guarantees to real-time applications. This paper describes the design and implementation of the suite, the experiments we performed, and selected results, along with the lessons we learned. 1. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Cooperative Agreement NCR-8919038 with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, by AT&T Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hitachi, Ltd., Hitachi America, Ltd., Pacific Bell, the University of California under several MICRO grants, and the International Computer Science Institute. Bruce A. Mah and Mark Moran were supported by NSF Graduate Fellowships. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors, and should not be interpreted as representing official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government or any of the sponsoring organizations. Dinesh C. Verma [email protected] IBM T J Watson Research Center Hui Zhang [email protected] School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University