Internet services with anycast real-time communication flow can be very useful for many Internet applications, such as multimedia e-business, audio and video conferencing, and replicated database updating and querying. Anycast is a new communication service defined in IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6 for next generation). An anycast multimedia flow is a sequence of packets that can be sent to any one of the members in a group of designated recipients.

This project will study a set of distributed admission control (DAC) algorithms for anycast multimedia flows and explore how the algorithms differ from each other in their dependence on system status information. The focus will be on the algorithms that perform dynamic destination selection, which is critical for setting up the connections for anycast multimedia flows. The researchers will address the issue of resource reservation and retrial control in the DAC system. The proposed mechanisms and algorithms will be evaluated by mathematical analysis and computer simulation. The mathematical analysis will focus on the theory of stability of flow admissions in terms of end-to-end delay and admission probability.