Load-balanced routing for collaborative multimedia communication

An important class of multimedia applications involve real-time distributed collaboration or distributed control. This paper examines some of the issues in network support for this class of applications and presents Collaborative Load-Balanced Routing (CLBR), a new technique for routing and call establishment of distributed collaborative and control multimedia applications. CLBR substantially reduces the overhead of communication establishment in the network between two-party distributed multimedia applications. This is achieved through an adaptive load-balancing and single source single pass approach to routing and call establishment. A large scale simulation study comparing CLBR to other types of uni-cast routing shows that this speed up can be achieved without any corresponding decrease in the networks ability to support new communication requests.