Well known requirements for handling multimedia flows in routers are
resource reservation and fast packets forwarding. The former takes into account the
quite stable and long lasting bandwidth occupation, whereas the latter takes into
account the large number of packets routed along the same path. Many techniques
have been proposed and standardized to face these requirements, but their application
is often complex, expensive and sometimes limited by the need of agreements
between network managers of the many networks and Autonomous Systems.
This paper introduces IMFM (Integrated Multimedia Flows Management), an
innovative, scalable, and extremely lightweight technique to provide routers
deterministic and dynamic resource reservation and a fast forwarding table lookup.
It is based on a distributed linked data structure that allows direct (searchless) access
to entries in the routers’ tables, extending the resource reservation algorithm
REBOOK. Unlike conventional virtual circuits, IMFM does not require any interaction
with (nor change in) the underlying routing protocols and autonomously
recovers from errors, faults and route changes. If information stored in its data
structure becomes obsolete, packet handling is reverted to best-effort, lookup-driven
forwarding, so that packets are never dropped nor misrouted. IMFM can be gradually
deployed, providing a framework for congestion avoidance solutions and
increasing the forwarding speed in IMFM-aware router even along partially IMFMunaware
paths. IMFM has been fully implemented. Experiments have been
designed to demonstrate its feasibility and the measured performance is reported
and compared with existing techniques
