An Active Network Solution to the Problem of RSVP Reservation Gaps

With the increasing diversity in network applications and traffic types in the Internet, providing end-to-end QoS support to user traffic has been identified as one of the prime solution to provide deterministic service levels within the network. Due to the heterogeneity exhibited by the Internet, a route for a flow requiring QoS guarantees may not be available from source to destination comprising exclusively QoS supporting path segments. Hence the flow must traverse one or more non-QoS segments referred to here as “reservation gaps”. In this paper we study the problem of reservation gaps and present a solution to address the deficiencies caused by these gaps, using an Active Network approach based on the mobile agent paradigm. The solution we propose is scalable to large networks, like the Internet. We demonstrate the advantages of such a solution using simulations which compares operational characteristics of QoS flows when traversing non-managed and actively managed reservation gaps.