Evaluation of Resource Sharing Beneets

Current approaches to supporting real-time communication allocate network resources either to individual connections, or to aggregates of connections, based on type of traac, protocol, or performance requirements. The rst approach provides well-deened performance guarantees that are independent of other network traac. The second approach may achieve higher utilization of network resources, but the expected performance is less well-deened since it is dependent on the behavior of unrelated (possibly unknown) connections. We previously presented resource sharing , a new approach that exploits known relationships between related connections to allow network resources to be shared without sacriicing well-deened guarantees. Resource sharing is very important for large conferences with a bounded number of concurrent speakers, resource requirements do not increase with the number of potential speakers. In this paper, we evaluate resource sharing beneets by analysis and by simulation. Results show that resource sharing leads to a large gain in the connection acceptance rate, and a signiicant reduction in the computational overhead associated with admission control.