Traffic engineering in a multipoint-to-point network

The need to guarantee quality-of-service (QoS) to multimedia applications leads to a tight integration between the routing and forwarding functions in the Internet. multiprotocol label switching tries to provide a global solution for this integration. In this context, multipoint-to-point (m2p) networks appear as a key architecture since they provide a cheaper way to connect edge nodes than point-to-point connections. M2p networks have been mainly studied for their load balancing ability. In this paper, we go a step further: we propose and evaluate a traffic management scheme that provides deterministic QoS guarantees for multimedia sources in an m2p network. We first derive an accurate upper bound on the end-to-end delay in an m2p architecture based on the concept of additivity. Broadly speaking, an m2p network is additive if the maximum end-to-end delay is equal to the sum of local maximum delays. We then introduce two admission control algorithms for additive networks: a centralized algorithm and a distributed algorithm and discuss their complexity and their scalability.