Experiments with the tenet real-time protocol suite on the Sequoia 2000 wide area network

Emerging distributed multimedia applications have stringent performance requirements in terms of bandwidth, delay, delay-jitter, and loss rate. The Tenet real-time protocol suite provides the services and mechanisms for delivering such performance guarantees, even during periods of high network load and congestion. The protocols achieve this by using resource management, connection admission control, and appropriate packet service disciplines inside the network. The Sequoia 2000 network employs the Tenet Protocol Suite at each of its hosts and routers making it one of the first wide area packet-switched networks to provide end-to-end per-connection performance guarantees. This paper presents experiments with the Tenet protocols on the Sequoia 2000 network including measurements of the performance of the protocols, the service recieved by real multimedia applications using the protocols, and comparisons with the service received by applications that use the Internet protocols (UDP/IP). We conclude that the Tenet protocols successfully protect the real-time channels from other traffic in the network, including other real-time channels, and allow channels to continue to meet their performance guarantees, even when the network is highly loaded.