Guaranteeing deterministic QoS in a multipoint-to-point network

The need to guarantee QoS to multimedia sources leads to a convergence between the routing and forwarding functions in the Internet. MPLS provides a solution to this integration. In the context of MPLS, multipoint-to-point (m-t-p) architectures appear as key architectures since they provide a cheaper way to connect edge nodes than point-to-point connections, in an Internet Service Provider backbone. Th m-t-p architecture has been mainly studied for its ability to balance load. In the present work, we go a step further and evaluate two traffic management schemes that provide deterministic QoS guarantees for multimedia constrained sources in a m-tp network. The first scheme is based on the FIFO policy and manages the multimedia sources as variable bit rate sources. The second scheme shapes the sources before they enter the network so as to manage them as constant bit rate sources in the network. We prove that the second scheme performs better in terms of scalability and resource requirements.