An overview of quality of service routing for next-generation high-speed networks: problems and solutions

TLDR

High‑speed gigabit networks will support real‑time multimedia, creating new QoS routing challenges that have led to many unicast/multicast algorithms classified into source, distributed, and hierarchical routing. The paper reviews QoS routing, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of existing strategies while outlining challenges and future directions. It surveys QoS routing methods, describing how they select resource‑sufficient paths, classifying algorithms into source, distributed, and hierarchical types, and comparing their strengths and weaknesses.

Abstract

The upcoming gigabit-per-second high-speed networks are expected to support a wide range of communication-intensive real-time multimedia applications. The requirement for timely delivery of digitized audio-visual information raises new challenges for next-generation integrated services broadband networks. One of the key issues is QoS routing. It selects network routes with sufficient resources for the requested QoS parameters. The goal of routing solutions is twofold: (1) satisfying the QoS requirements for every admitted connection, and (2) achieving global efficiency in resource utilization. Many unicast/multicast QoS routing algorithms have been published, and they work with a variety of QoS requirements and resource constraints. Overall, they can be partitioned into three broad classes: (1) source routing, (2) distributed routing, and (3) hierarchical routing algorithms. We give an overview of the QoS routing problem as well as the existing solutions. We present the strengths and weaknesses of different routing strategies, and outline the challenges. We also discuss the basic algorithms in each class, classify and compare them, and point out possible future directions in the QoS routing area.