Elastic Timeslot-Based Advance Reservation Algorithm for Enterprise Video Conferencing Systems

In an enterprise network, it is common to have hundreds of video conferences held simultaneously such that a large number of video streams need to be transmitted between participants in different geographical locations. For such a large transmission demand, an advance reservation (AR) system deployed for the video conferencing system can provide quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees to users and improve the resource utilization of the network. However, the effective resource reservation strategies for a heavy traffic case still remains open. In this paper, we propose an algorithm called the elastic timeslot-based advance reservation algorithm (ETARA), which aims at improving the resource utilization and reducing the computational complexity. A new time processing method, elastic timeslot, is proposed for the time domain management. Moreover, ETARA takes not only the processing time but also the resource usage into account. Comparative simulations with the existing two popular approaches, the dynamic timeslot-based approach and timeslot-based flexible approach, have been performed in terms of the acceptance ratio and runtime. The results show that with the same acceptance ratio, the runtime of ETARA can be up to 57 times lower than that of the flexible timeslot-based approach. Though ETARA has a slightly longer runtime than the dynamic approach, the acceptance ratio of ETARA can be twice as high as that of the dynamic timeslot-based approach.