The Tenet real-time protocol suite: Design, implementation, and experiences

Many future applications will require guarantees on network performance, such as bounds on throughput, delay, delay jitter, and reliability. To address this need, we have designed, simulated, and implemented a suite of network protocols to support real-time channels (network connections with mathematically provable performance guarantees). The protocols, which constitute the prototype Tenet real-time protocol suite (Suite 1), run on a packet-switching internetwork and can coexist with the popular Internet protocol suite. We rely on the use of connection-oriented communication, per-channel admission control, channel rate control, and priority scheduling. This protocol suite is the first set of transport and network-layer communication protocols that can transfer real-time streams with guaranteed quality in packet-switching internetworks. We have performed a number of experiments and demonstrations on multiple platforms using continuous-media loads (particularly video). Our results show that our approach is both feasible and practical to build, and that it can successfully provide performance guarantees to real-time applications. This paper describes the design and implementation of the suite, the experiments we performed, and some of the lessons we learned. © 1996 IEEE.