Performance of QoS agents for provisioning network resources

We have designed an agent-based architecture for quantitative service provisioning in differentiated services capable networks. For each link-state routing domain in the network there is a topology-aware QoS agent (also known as a bandwidth broker) responsible for admission control. The architecture provides resource reservations for aggregated virtual leased lines between network domains. In this paper, we present performance measurements for resource provisioning in a prototype QoS agent. This includes an evaluation of two data structures for advance reservations and accompanying algorithms. We also compare the cost for on-demand route computations with pre-computation of routes. The objective in this paper is to evaluate the performance of end-to-end admission control within a single link-state routing domain. In a domain with 15 routers, 28 transition networks and 64 stub networks, our prototype performs approximately 25000 end-to-end admission decisions per second. The results show that an ordinary PC can be used for running a QoS agent that performs path-sensitive admission control and maintains per link resource reservations in a link-state routing domain.