TCP throughput guarantee in the DiffServ Assured Forwarding service: what about the results?

Since the proposition of Quality of Service architectures by the IETF, the interaction between TCP and the QoS services has been intensively studied. This paper proposes to look forward to the results obtained in terms of TCP throughput guarantee in the DiffServ Assured Forwarding (DiffServ/AF) service and to present an overview of the different proposals to solve the problem. It has been demonstrated that the standardized IETF DiffServ conditioners such as the token bucket color marker and the time sliding window color maker were not good TCP traffic descriptors. Starting with this point, several propositions have been made and most of them presents new marking schemes in order to replace or improve the traditional token bucket color marker. The main problem is that TCP congestion control is not designed to work with the AF service. Indeed, both mechanisms are antagonists. TCP has the property to share in a fair manner the bottleneck bandwidth between flows while DiffServ network provides a level of service controllable and predictable. In this paper, we build a classification of all the propositions made during these last years and compare them. As a result, we will see that these conditioning schemes can be separated in three sets of action level and that the conditioning at the network edge level is the most accepted one. We conclude that the problem is still unsolved and that TCP, conditioned or not conditioned, remains inappropriate to the DiffServ/AF service

Network level performance of differentiated services (diffserv) networks

The Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture is a promising means of providing Quality of Service (QoS) in Internet. In DiffServ networks, three service classes, or Per-hop Behaviors (PHBs), have been defined: Expedited Forwarding (EF), Assured Forwarding (AF) and Best Effort (BE). In this dissertation, the performance of DiffServ networks at the network level, such as end-to-end QoS, network stability, and fairness of bandwidth allocation over the entire network have been extensively investigated. It has been shown in literature that the end-to-end delay of EF traffic can go to infinity even in an over-provisioned network. In this dissertation, a simple scalable aggregate scheduling scheme, called Youngest Serve First (YSF) algorithm is proposed. YSF is not only able to guarantee finite end-to-end delay, but also to keep a low scheduling complexity. With respect to the Best Effort traffic, Random Exponential Marking (REM), an existing AQM scheme is studied under a new continuous time model, and its local stable condition is presented. Next, a novel virtual queue and rate based AQM scheme (VQR) is proposed, and its local stability condition has been presented. Then, a new AQM framework, Edge-based AQM (EAQM) is proposed. EAQM is easier to implement, and it achieves similar or better performance than traditional AQM schemes. With respect to the Assured Forwarding, a network-assist packet marking (NPM) scheme has been proposed. It has been demonstrated that NPM can fairly distribute bandwidth among AF aggregates based on their Committed Information Rates (CIRs) in both single and multiple bottleneck link networks

Design, implementation and evaluation of a QoS-aware transport protocol

In the context of a reconfigurable transport protocol framework, we propose a QoS-aware Transport Protocol (QSTP), specifically designed to operate over QoS-enabled networks with bandwidth guarantee. QSTP combines QoS-aware TFRC congestion control mechanism, which takes into account the network-level bandwidth reservations, with a Selective ACKnowledgment (SACK) mechanism in order to provide a QoS-aware transport service that fill the gap between QoS enabled network services and QoS constraint applications. We have developed a prototype of this protocol in the user-space and conducted a large range of measurements to evaluate this proposal under various network conditions. Our results show that QSTP allows applications to reach their negotiated QoS over bandwidth guaranteed networks, such as DiffServ/AF network, where TCP fails. This protocol appears to be the first reliable protocol especially designed for QoS network architectures with bandwidth guarantee

Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN) Architecture

This document describes a general architecture for flow admission and termination based on pre-congestion information in order to protect the quality of service of established, inelastic flows within a single Diffserv domain.\u

An adaptive algorithm for Internet multimedia delivery in a DiffServ environment.

To meet the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of multimedia applications and to reduce the network congestion, several service models and mechanisms have been proposed. Among these, Differentiated Service (DiffServ) architecture has been considered as a scalable and flexible QoS architecture for the Internet. DiffServ provides class-based QoS guarantees. Applications in different classes receive different QoS and are priced differently. If network congestion occurs, DiffServ may not be able to guarantee the QoS for the application. Thus, the QoS may not reflect the price paid for the service. A problem of considerable economic and research importance is how to achieve a good price and quality tradeoff even at times of congestion. This thesis presents an Adaptive Class Switching Algorithm (ACSA) which intends to provide good quality with good price for real-time multimedia applications in a DiffServ environment. The ACSA algorithm combines the techniques of Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), DiffServ, and Adaptation together. It also takes both QoS and price into account to provide users a good QoS with a good price. The algorithm dynamically selects the most suitable class based on both the QoS feedback received and the highest user utility. The user utility is a function of quality, price, and the weight which reflects the relative sensitivity to quality and price. The class with the highest user utility is the class that provides the best quality and price tradeoff. The QoS feedback is conveyed by RTP\u27s Control Protocol (RTCP) Receiver Reports. The results of simulation demonstrate that ACSA can react fast to the current class state in the network and reflects the best QoS and price tradeoff. It always seeks to find a class which provides the highest user utility except when the Internet is congested and the required QoS in all classes can not be satisfied. If this happens, the real-time multimedia flow chooses Best-Effort class with no payment. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .F46. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-01, page: 0389. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005