1. Introduction

Recent multimedia applications require stringent values of QoS. Introducing high quality video and audio signals has made it difficult for the existing infrastructure of the Internet to cope with those multimedia applications. Furthermore, recent applications are associated with user interactions, and the ability to browse different scenarios at the same time. In fact, these services made the researchers look for other solutions and even make changes to the existing Internet infrastructure. The problem of the QoS in the Internet requires a close cooperation between different protocols and components. For example, in the network there should be cooperation between the session setup protocols and the routing protocols to establish a path that can handle the QoS request. This also requires the cooperation of admission control, packet classifiers and packet schedulers.

The literature on QoS contains many proposals for fulfilling the requirements of real-time applications. All proposals agree that the best way to guarantee QoS is to provide some sort of resource reservations in the network elements. Resource reservations could be done immediately or in advance, to reflect human life in arranging and monitoring their activity schedules. To increase the admission rate of real-time applications several proposals for improving the routing protocols, to be QoS sensitive, have been suggested.

In previous work [SAL 99b] we have developed end-to-end resource reservations architecture. The architecture treats the Internet as a...