A Mechanism for Dynamic Re - routing of Real - time Channels Colin

Various solutions have been proposed to provide real-time services (i.e., services with guaranteed performance requirements) in packet-switched networks. These solutions usually require xed routing and resource reservation for each conversation. The routing and reservation decisions, combined with load uctuations, introduce the problems of network unavailability and loss of network management exibility. We believe that these problems can be alleviated by properly balancing the network load. In this paper, we present a mechanism that dynamically reroutes a real-time channel without disruption of service to the clients. This mechanism is one component in a framework to investigate load balancing in a real-time internetwork. We show that the mechanism can be incorporated into the Tenet real-time protocol suite with minimal changes and overhead.