A dynamic routing procedure for connections with quality of service requirements

Emerging high-speed networks will support a number of real-time services required by distributed multimedia applications, such as video-on-demand. To support these services, appropriate routing procedures should be used; upon receipt of a request to open a new connection with certain quality of service (QoS) requirements, an appropriate routing procedure calculates an "optimal" route (with respect to a certain cost function) which satisfies the connection requirements. Most existing routing procedures for real-time connections determine routes which satisfy only a subset of QoS requirements and optimize in terms of QoS information (e.g. a route with the smallest end-to-end delay). The authors present a routing procedure which finds a route, if it does exist, which satisfies the whole set of QoS requirements; the route could be optimal in terms of QoS information, money to pay for the utilization of network resources, or network reliability; it is up to the network operator to select the optimization criteria to be used by the routing procedure. They also describe how the proposed routing procedure can be used in ATM environment.