Routing virtual circuits with timing requirements in virtual path based ATM networks

Real-time communication with performance guarantees is expected to become an important feature of future computer networks. Given an ATM network topology, its virtual path (VP) layout, and its traffic demands, we consider in this paper the problem of selecting for each virtual circuit (VC) with timing requirements a route (i.e., a sequence of VPs) along which sufficient resources are available to meet the user-specified end-to-end delay requirements. Our objective is to (i) provide the timing guarantee for the VC, while not jeopardizing the QoS guarantees to other existing VCs. We adopt the real-time channel model to characterize the traffic characteristics and the timing requirements of a VC. We then propose a distributed VC routing scheme based on the distributed Bellman-Ford algorithm to identify an "appropriate" route through the network. By "appropriate", we mean that the route traverses a minimum number of VPs among all possible routes that have sufficient resources over to fulfill the end-to-end timing requirement of the VC. To ensure that there are sufficient bandwidths over all the VPs along the selected route, we incorporate in our proposed scheme a priority assignment method to calculate the minimum worst-case traversal time which messages of a VC will experience on a VP along which the VC is routed. We also comment on the performance of, and the message overhead incurred in the proposed scheme.