Application-aware routing protocol

Increasingly, there is a need for context-aware networking. For example, in multimedia networks with heterogeneous end equipment, if two or more communicating nodes do not have the same application-layer interface, the network should be aware of the "context" of the communication in order to select an appropriate converter through which to route connections. In this paper, we motivate the need for logical connections, where a logical connection consists of one or more network-layer connections routed through application-layer resources, such as bridges and/or format/rate converters. We then describe the application-aware routing protocol (AARP) for managing logical connections.