Conclusion

The new requirements in terms of real-time services imposed by emerging multimedia applications are the essential motivation behind the design of reservation protocols. These protocols are often called setup protocols because they are used to build real-time channels associated with the subsequent data transmission. Setup protocols are today still experimental, as experimental are many of the techniques that they adopt. We intended to explore these techniques and the way they are embedded in real setup protocols by designing, realizing, and experimenting with innovative mechanisms and functions.The protocol implementation described in this thesis is relevant because all protocol functions are coupled with appropriate resource management functions. Experimentation with this implementation served to better understand the interactions among these two fundamental components. Here, those that are believed to be the main results of this work are shortly summarized.