A distributed table-driven route selection scheme for establishing real-time video channels

To guarantee the delivery of real-time messages before their deadline, a real-time connection or channel must be established before the transmission of any real-time messages. During this channel-establishment phase, one must first select a route between the source and destination of this channel and then reserve sufficient resources along this route so that the worst-case end-to-end delay over the selected route may not exceed the user-specified delay bound. We propose a table-driven distributed route-selection scheme that is guaranteed to find a "qualified" route, if any, that meets the performance requirement of the requested channel without compromising any of the existing guarantees. The proposed scheme uses the Bellman-Ford shortest path algorithm to build real-time delay tables, and hence, can solve the route-selection problem by a simple table look-up. Several examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed route-selection scheme.