Scalable Resource Provisioning for Multi-user Communications in Next Generation Networks

The great demand for real-time multimedia sessions encompassing groups of users (multi-user), associated with the limitations of the current Internet in providing quality assurance, has raised challenges for defining the best mechanisms to deploy the Next Generation of Networks (NGN). There is a consensus that an efficient and scalable provisioning of network resources is crucial for the success of the NGN, mainly in what concerns access networks. Previous solutions for the control of multi-user sessions rely mostly on uncoordinated actions to allocate per-flow bandwidth and multicast trees. This paper introduces a Multiuser Aggregated Resource Allocation mechanism (MARA) that coordinates the control of class-based bandwidth and multicast resources in a scalable manner. In comparison with previous work, MARA significantly reduces signaling, state and processing overhead. The performance benefits of MARA are analyzed though simulations, which successfully demonstrated the significant optimization in the network performance.