Adaptive bandwidth reservation scheme for multimedia traffic using mobile agents

The bandwidth reservation for multimedia traffic poses technical challenges due to the bursty and delay sensitive nature of applications. The objectives of bandwidth reservation schemes are: optimize network utilization, and minimize the packet losses and delays. The growth of multimedia services on the Internet and the possible discovery of programmable networks has made us investigate new techniques for resolving bandwidth issues in multimedia communication. Mobile agent technology seems to be a promising solution for network management and QoS control. In this paper, we consider joint problems of adaptive bandwidth reservation and link rearrangement (rerouting) for multimedia traffic under the event of congestion/failures of link, and propose a mobile agent based approach to achieve these objectives. The scheme is simulated using a multimedia traffic model. Simulation results show that the use of agents increases the network utilization, acceptance ratio of applications, flexibility and efficiency of bandwidth reservation. The flexibility in using agent technology is that the policies can be changed and implemented easily by encoding in the agents.