Multicast Support in DiffServ Using Mobile Agents

Many multicast applications, such as video-on-demand and video conferencing, desire quality of service (QoS) support from an underlying network. The differentiated services (DiffServ) approach will bring benefits for theses applications. However, difficulties arise while integrating native IP multicasting with DiffServ, such as multicast group states in the core routers and a heterogeneous QoS requirement within the same multicast group. In addition, a missing per-flow reservation in DiffServ and a dynamic join/leave in the group introduce heavier and uncontrollable traffic in a network. In this paper, we propose a distributed and stateless admission control in the edge routers. We also use a mobile agents-based approach for dynamic resource availability checking. In this approach, mobile agents act in a parallel and distributed fashion and cooperate with each other in order to construct the multicast tree satisfying the QoS requirements.