Application Level Routing in a Mesh Router?

faisaladeem asks: "Are there such mesh routers that can re-route the traffic based on QoS? (I'm not talking about traffic shaping) For example, if data rate of a video stream decreases due to an increase in congestion along the path then the router will re-route the stream dynamically to a different path to ensure the QoS for the video traffic. Since a mesh network has many paths or routes, it can be assumed that a less congestive path can be found if the existing path becomes bandwidth constrained. I heard that MPLS supports this kind of functionality? Secondly, can a router estimate the latency/bandwidth on a specific route ?"

Comments

Re:RSVP

[MerlynEmrys67]

Have you ever run an RSVP enabled network ?

While it is an interesting excersize - it is far from prime time. First you have the overhead of extra packet scheduling (and making sure that each RSVP'd stream stays within its reservation) - then there is the whole problem of what to do with packets that fall outside the reservation. Lets not even get into the policy questions on how a router decides if a reservation should be honored or not (much less who to charge for the bandwidth commitment)

All in all - over provisioning is still your friend

Re:Anybody finds this interesting?

[flipper65]

Actually, MPLS would fit the bill here quite nicely. It allows you to specify ToS in an external label so that the routers do not need to peek at content to make routing deciscions. This makes for very fast routing deciscions. Keep in mind that you will have to support QoS edge to edge and once a packet hits an egress point to the public internet, boom, the QoS and ToS bits are stripped away. You might want to look at products from Riverstone, Alcatel, Seimens, and last but certainly not least expensive, Cisco.