A master-slave network architecture to support QoS routing

QoS routing is concerned with determining a path through the network that has the potential of satisfying the constraints of a QoS connection while simultaneously achieving global efficiency in network resource utilization. Existing QoS routing techniques suffer from excessive computation, communication and storage overheads and/or routing delay, which hinders their applicability in large networks consisting of multiple domains. In this paper we present a novel master-slave network architecture that provides a comprehensive solution to the problem of QoS routing. The architecture combines the existing routing techniques in an intelligent manner, such that the composite routing technique mitigates the overheads associated with each one of the constituent techniques. Due to this the composite routing technique can be used in a large network, and hence the architecture provides a unified solution to the problem of intra-domain and inter-domain QoS routing. The architecture also incorporates the efficient reverse path precomputation technique which further reduces the overheads associated with one of the constituent QoS routing techniques, and hence the composite QoS routing technique.