| A great deal of effort for making resource reservations possible in internetworks was carried out in the research community by developing an integrated service model and signaling protocols to exchange reservation information over network nodes. One of the widely supported signaling protocols is the resource reservation protocol (RSVP). RSVP is designed to run over the connectionless Internet Protocol (IP) layer to provide a soft state record of flow information end-to-end. Since RSVP's main concern is carrying flow information to intermediate network nodes, it leaves the implementation of the actual reservation up to each node. In this research, an edge device for making and mapping reservations at the edge of different network clouds was examined. The target network environment was a heterogeneous packet switched network, which consists of Internet Protocol transported over both Ethernet and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network segments with the support of RSVP as a signaling protocol. The edge device architecture and issues on hybrid network management were discussed. As a solution for realization and mapping of reservations in the heterogeneous network, a new scheduling algorithm, hierarchical class structured packet-size based queuing (H-PBQ) was introduced. The edge device prototype, which implements the H-PBQ algorithm and other active traffic control components in LINUX, is also provided with some performance examinations. |
