Design, implementation and test of a RSVP agent based on a generic QoS API

Abstract

The emergence of new multimedia applications over IP (videoconference, voice and fax over IP, etc.) produces a great demand of QoS in the IP environment. However, QoS is difficult to implement in a best-effort network as Internet. For IP QoS, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed two models: the Integrated Services architecture (IntServ) and the Differentiated Services (DiffServ). The IntServ architecture uses RSVP as a protocol for signalling and allowing resource reservation. This paper presents the design, implementation and test of a RSVP agent based on a generic QoS API. The generic QoS API may support new mechanisms for providing QoS in the future other than RSVP. Many applications are not designed taking into account QoS management and source code is not available usually. Even if the source code is available, adapting an application for QoS management is not a straightforward task. Furthermore, it is not easy to identify the most suitable RSVP parameters for each profile. This agent allows both static and automatic reservations through an IP-probe matching the instantaneous resource requirements of the application and the reservation managed by RSVP. In order to validate the implementation and use of the RSVP agent, some tests were carried out with multimedia applications. These tests show some characteristics of the QoS-network and the agent behaviour.