Abstract
To provide quality of service guarantees, resource reservation schemes have to maintain reservation states at the nodes along the path of a flow. Advance reservation schemes have to maintain these states for a long period of time. The loss of reservation state caused by node failures, makes advance reservation schemes highly susceptible to node failures. In this paper, we argue that a domain-by-domain reservation approach is inherently more fault tolerant than the traditional hop-by-hop approach. We propose a novel domain-based protocol for handling advance reservations. It requires support only at the edge routers and no changes are required at the core routers. We describe various factors which determine whether a flow’s advance reservation is handled properly by a network in event of router failures. We use simulations to show that our protocol is highly fault tolerant. Our protocol allows the best effort flows to utilize the remaining bandwidth without any static partitioning of bandwidth among reserved and best effort flows.