Decoupling QOS Guarantees and Connection Establishment in Communication Networks

Quality of Service guarantees are necessary for efficient network communication for distributed multimedia applications. However, most proposed QOS schemes couple resource allocation and QOS guarantees with connection establishment, and therefore fail to perform efficiently for applications like WWW browsing which establish short-lived connections frequently. In this paper, we argue that resource allocation be separated from connection establishment, and that resources be allocated in the network on an abstraction that is separate from that of a connection. We explore the issues in decoupling connection establishment and QOS reservation, and propose a new network architecture that addresses some of those issues.