• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.409-418
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• 2009

Providing Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantee requires for each router on the path of a traffic flow not to violate the flow's delay budget allocated to itself. Since the amount of load being offered to the router is determined by the budget, some imbalance in load among routers on the path may be alleviated by means of adjusting the budget. The equal allocation applied to the resource reservation protocol (RSVP) is simple to implement, but it has the drawback of a poor resource utilization. A load balancing method in which the delay budget being allocated to a router depends on its load state was developed to improve the drawback, but it's too complex to apply to the RSVP. This paper proposes an intra-path load balancing method not only applicable to the RSVP but also more effective in improving the drawback. The proposed method first partitions the end-to-end delay bound of a flow to routers by the RSVP and then let them adjust their budgets according to both the bottleneck state of the path and their links' bandwidth availabilities. The results of the simulation applying the proposed method to an evaluation network showed that the proposed method may provide the gain of 4 ${\sim}$ 17 % compared to that in the legacy one in terms of the number of maximally admittable flows.