Extensible signaling for temporal resource sharing

The Internet is rapidly evolving from a network that provides basic best-effort communication service to an infrastructure capable of supporting complex value-added services. These services typically have multiple fluffs with interdependent resource requirements. These dependencies provide opportunities to share the same set of resources among related flows over time leading to significant resource gains. We call this type of sharing temporal resource sharing. Exploiting temporal sharing requires support in the signaling protocol that performs resource allocation for the related flows. We examine the problem of supporting temporal sharing in a signaling protocol. This paper makes the case that temporal sharing support must be designed to be extensible, so that service providers can define and implement new sharing behaviors without having to modify the signaling protocol. We motivate the need for an extensible design by showing that the range of possible temporal sharing behaviors is large and supporting the most general forms of temporal sharing is computationally expensive. We then present a design for extensible signaling support for temporal sharing. We have implemented the temporal sharing design presented in this paper in the Beagle signaling protocol. We present an evaluation of the Beagle design and contrast it with other signaling protocols like RSVP and Tenet-2.