Impact of the resource needed for renegotiating ATM rates

The ability to renegotiate bandwidth requirements is fundamental to most ATM scenarios but this must come at some cost in terms of the resources needed during renegotiation. In this paper, we take a simple model of the environment in which negotiations take place and develop new strategies for renegotiation. The strategies are compared with data from variable bit-rate video and are relevant to the environment where there is a playout of stored information, such as Video on Demand, and for the playout of live video. The results show that the implementation of renegotiation options is profitable for both user and network operator. The user will benefit from a better price. The operator will gain by being able to accommodate more users with the same hardware. The results indicate decreasing profit for both parties with increasing cost of renegotiation, which should add an incentive to keep renegotiation costs low.