A Scheme for Real-Time Channel Establishment in Wide-Area Networks

Multimedia communication involving digital audio and/or digital video has rather strict delay requirements. A real-time channel is defined in this paper as a simplex connection between a source and a destination characterized by parameters representing the performance requirements of the client. A real-time service is capable of creating real-time channels on demand and guaranteeing their performance. These guarantees often take the form of lower bounds on the bandwidth allocated to a channel and upper bounds on the delays to be experienced by a packet on the channel. This paper studies the feasibility of providing real-time services on a packet-switched store-and-forward wide-area network with general topology.