End system support for networking with quality of service guarantees

Abstract

In part due to the emergence of continuous media applications having real-time constraints, networking with quality of service (QoS) guarantees has become an increasingly important goal. Towards this goal, we present an end system architecture with the following major components: (1) adaptive rate-controlled (ARC) scheduling for time shared resources in an end system, such as CPTJ and network interface, (2) a framework of Migrating Sockets for user level protocols that minimizes hidden scheduling in protocol processing, and (3) based. on "exclusive" packet receiver information exported by Migrating Sockets, a constant overhead packet demultiplexing mechanism suitable for wide area internetwork communication (active demultiplexing). We have an implementation of our architecture in Solaris 2.5.