Performance evaluation of a lightweight resource reservation protocol for mobile Internet hosts

The increasing volume of multimedia traffic carried over the Internet is rapidly demanding quality of service (QoS) beyond the traditional best effort. The Integrated Services (IntServ) model is one of the first QoS models proposed for the Internet and it relies on RSVP (Resource reSerVation Protocol) for signalling and resource reservation. RSVP uses a receiver-initiated reservation mechanism to set up the reservation for a particular data flow and relies on a "soft" state mechanism to maintain the reservation. This mechanism is targeted to accommodate large groups, dynamic group membership and heterogeneous receiver requirements. However, it imposes protocol complexity and incurs additional processing and storage overheads on the network routers, resulting in the notorious scalability problem of RSVP. Thus, simpler sender-initiated reservation mechanisms have been proposed and studied by many researchers to overcome this. We propose a lightweight signalling protocol for mobile hosts, called SMRP (Sender-initiated and Mobility-support Reservation Protocol). In this paper, we evaluate the performance of SMRP in a mobile environment.