Future Internet video multicasting with essentially perfect resource utilization and QoS guarantees

Abstract

The multicasting of aggregated digital video over a proposed Future Internet backbone network with essentially perfect throughput, resource-utilization and QoS guarantees is summarized. The Future Internet routers require only minor modifications to the existing router designs. Buffers in existing internet routers are partitioned into 2 traffic classes which can co-exist, the Essentially-Perfect QoS class and the Best-Effort class, i.e., no new buffers are required. Each router includes an FPGA-based Scheduler Lookup Table for the essentially perfect QoS class. RSVP-TE is used to provision the multicast trees in an MPLS-TE network. Each router computes an essentially-perfect transmission schedule for all its QoS-enabled traffic flows, which never experience interference or congestion. (This integer-programming scheduling problem is a long-standing unsolved problem.) The Best-Effort traffic is scheduled using the usual Best-Effort schedulers. It is shown that thousands of bursty self-similar video streams can be multicast across the proposed Future Internet with essentially-perfect link efficiencies and QoS guarantees. The technology (i) can be added into new Internet routers with minimal cost (i.e., a few FPGAs); (ii) it allows for the co-existence of the Essentially-Perfect QoS and the usual Best-Effort traffic classes; (iii) it is compatible with the existing IEFT DiffServ and MPLS-TE service models; (iv) it allows for Internet link efficiencies as high as 100%, and (v) it can reduce Internet router buffer and power requirements significantly.