An agent-based architecture for advance reservations

The authors propose an architecture where clients can make advance reservations through agents. For each routing domain in the network there will be an agent responsible for admission control on behalf of the routers in the domain. Requests involving several routing domains are forwarded for admission control with agents along the path for the requested service. Agents maintain hard reservation state using a reliable protocol for agent intercommunication. Agents start allocating resources for advance reservations in the routers by setting up forwarding state shortly before resources are needed for packet fop warding. Resources are made available for advance reservations by means of rejecting further immediate requests and ultimately by preempting some immediate reservations. They have shown that the risk of preemption can be kept very low. Thus, agents can set up packet classifiers and schedulers in their routers, allowing routers to get on with their main task, packet forwarding.