Decoupling QOS Guarantees and Connection Establishment in Communication Networks

Quality of Service guarntees ar e necessary for ef ficient network communication for distributed multimedia applications. Howe ver, most pr oposed QOS sc hemes couple resource allocation and QOS guar ntees with connection establishment, and ther efore fail to perform ef ficiently for applications lik e WWW br owsing which establish short-lived connections fr equently. In this paper , we argue that r esource allocation be separted from connection establishment, and that r esources be allocated in the network on an abstr action that is separ ate from that of a connection. W e explore the issues in decoupling connection establishment and QOS r eservation, and pr opose a ne w network ar chitecture that addresses some of those issues.