Abstract
Today, various real-time services, like audio/videoconferencing, and telemedicine, are being deployed over the Internet. This requires the network to provide the guarantee of the service provided to the receiver. The needs of the applications are specified in terms of the Quality of Service (QoS) metrics like desired bandwidth, response time, loss rate, expected reliability etc. Support for QoS needs to be provided at each of the layers of the protocol stack for overall efficiency in network utilization.
Routing algorithms supporting QoS differentiation differ from traditional routing algorithms in that, in QoS routing, the path from the source to the destination needs to satisfy multiple constraints simultaneously, while in conventional routing, routing decisions are made based only on a single metric such as cost or delay. However, it is well known that path selection subject to two or more independent additive metrics is NP-complete, which means that there is no efficient(polynomial) exact solution for the general multi-constrained path(MCP) selection problems.
In this paper, we describe the outline of distributed QoS routing problems and propose a mean field annealing(MFA) heuristic algorithm to solve the MCP problem.
