A signaling protocol for structured resource allocation

There is an emerging class of multi-party, multimedia, multi-flow applications that have a high-level structure that imposes dependencies between resource allocations for flows within the application. These applications are also capable of making intelligent decisions on how resource allocation should be controlled within the application. The development of such applications places new requirements on signaling protocols. This paper outlines these new requirements, discusses ways in which they can be supported and presents the design and implementation of an experimental signaling protocol that supports these requirements. This paper makes the case that for these structured applications, there is an advantage to allocating the resources in an integrated fashion, i.e. computation, storage and communication resources for all the flows are allocated at the same time in a coordinated fashion. The concept of a virtual mesh is introduced as a key abstraction that encapsulates the set of resources that are allocated and managed in an integrated fashion to meet the needs of applications. The paper presents two mesh setup algorithms and a performance evaluation comparing them. Temporal resource sharing within the virtual mesh is discussed in detail and signaling support for temporal sharing at setup and runtime is examined. It is important to characterize temporal sharing since it can significantly reduce the resource requirements for applications. We have implemented the Beagle signaling protocol that supports this integrated resource management model. Beagle representations and mechanisms for mesh setup and temporal sharing are described and a prototype implementation is presented.