Efficiency comparison of real-time transport protocols

In this paper we consider the problem of providing eecient network support to distributed real-time applications with diierent communication requirements. In the case of resource reservation protocols, the level of eeciency of a transport service connection provided by a communication system is innuenced by the applications requirements, in terms of amount of network resources needed to provide guaranteed Quality of Service. We consider the Tenet protocol suite, a connection-oriented in-ternetworking set of protocols based upon resource reservation. The suite provides a real-time network service (i.e., a service with guaranteed performance) to two types of applications: continuous media (CM) clients that generate data at regular time intervals (e.g., video and audio); message oriented clients that generate data at arbitrary times (e.g., urgent messages and remote control applications). We compare the performance of the transport protocol for CM clients (CMTP) to that of the transport protocol for message oriented clients (RMTP). In particular, we consider the buuer usage in the underlying real-time internetwork protocol (RTIP). The results of the simulations show that in the CMTP case, by taking advantage of the regular nature of CM clients, proper mechanisms can be adopted to further smooth traac, so that buuers are used much more eeciently than in the RMTP case.