A multimedia router architecture to provide high performance and QoS guarantees to mixed traffic

The explosive growth in using scalable and cost-effective clusters and local area environments involve the design of high performance networks aimed at providing QoS to multimedia flows. Thus, the main goal pursued by the Multi-Media (MMR) project is to design a single-chip router able to efficiently handle multimedia flows and best-effort traffic. In this paper we focus on the performance evaluation of the MMR architecture using a mix of CBR, VBR and best effort workload. Preliminary simulation results show that, by using simple link and switch scheduling algorithms, the router is able to achieve a link bandwidth utilization of 80%, while still providing QoS guarantees to both CBR and VBR traffic in the presence of best-effort traffic.