Abstract

Future applications will require network services that offer performance guarantees. We refer to such services as "real-time", and to network connections offering such guarantees as "real-time channels". In this report, we discuss the service description and interfaces for a mechanism for the administration of real-time channels. We also describe the Real-Time Channel Administration Protocol (RCAP), which implements this mechanism in the prototype version of the Tenet Real-Time Protocol Suite. 1.0 Introduction The Tenet Scheme for real-time communications introduces the concept of "real-time channels". A real-time channel is a simplex, unicast, network connection with associated performance guarantees [FerVer89]. Examples of such guarantees are an upper bound on the maximum end-to-end delay of a packet sent on a particular real-time channel or a lower bound on the throughput provided to a channel. We assert that many network applications in the future will require such performance gua...

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