Integrated multi-layer bandwidth recovery for multimedia communications

The quality of service required by multimedia applications, such as video on demand (VoD), must be seamlessly guaranteed in spite of any failure (e.g., connection failure or server failure). Thus, if connections carrying multimedia application traffic fail, not only the client-server connectivity but also the pre-failure QoS guarantees must be recovered to prevent user perception of the occurred failure. is study, a solution for recovering bandwidth guaranteed client-server connections (i.e., bandwidth recovery) is proposed and experimentally evaluated. The proposed solution can be applied to both bandwidth guaranteed connection failures and server failures. The bandwidth recovery scheme is based on the integration of an application layer recovery scheme, i.e. server migration, and a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) layer recovery scheme, i.e. LSP path restoration, through a resource broker (RB). The solution, being based on restoration, does not require prior extra resource allocation besides a working LSP, while at the application layer it requires the availability of a back-up server. The proposed RB solution can be easily implemented in a distributed environment. Experimental results show that the proposed bandwidth recovery scheme is able to dynamically recover bandwidth guaranteed connections within few seconds in all the considered connection failure scenarios