Resource sharing for multi-party real-time communication

Approaches to supporting real-time communication allocate network resources either to individual connections, or to aggregates of connections. Resource sharing is a new approach that exploits known relationships between related connections to allow network resources to be shared between them without sacrificing well-defined guarantees. The authors present a fully distributed technique for using resource sharing to provide guaranteed performance communication in a heterogeneous internetwork. Results show that resource sharing leads to a large gain in the connection acceptance rate, and a significant reduction in the computational overhead associated with admission control. Thus, resource sharing is an important tool for providing real-time performance guarantees for large conferences.