Application migration to reserved bandwidth networks

Abstract

The advent of high speed networks has stimulated development and deployment of many new distributed applications, such as multi-party video conferencing. At the same time, the networking community is rapidly moving towards new high speed networking architectures that offer advanced features such as guaranteed bandwidth and connection performance guarantees. The performance of many applications would be improved significantly if features offered by these new networks are utilized. While it is desirable to use the features of the new protocols provided by the emerging high speed networks, these protocols have not yet reached the same degree of stability and maturity as the existing protocols. As new networks with advanced features are deployed, schemes that take advantage of the advanced network capabilities, are necessary to migrate existing applications to the new networking interfaces. In this paper, several application migration paths are outlined. The concept of a Bandwidth Server, that provides transparent application migration, is introduced, e.g. transparent migration does not require an application to be re-written, re-compiled, or re-linked. We explore the design of a simple and efficient Bandwidth Server that allows TCP/IP applications, written using the well-known socket-interface, to execute across a B-ISDN network.