Enhancing QoS provisioning and granularity in next generation internet

Next Generation IP technology has the potential to prevail, both in the access and in the core networks, as we are moving towards a multi-service, multimedia and high-speed networking environment. Many new applications, including the multimedia applications, have been developed and deployed, and demand Quality of Service (QoS) support from the Internet, in addition to the current best effort service. Therefore, QoS provisioning techniques in the Internet to guarantee some specific QoS parameters are more a requirement than a desire. Due to the large amount of data flows and bandwidth demand, as well as the various QoS requirements, scalability and fine granularity in QoS provisioning are required. In this dissertation, the end-to-end QoS provisioning mechanisms are mainly studied, in order to provide scalable services with fine granularity to the users, so that both users and network service providers can achieve more benefits from the QoS provisioned in the network. To provide the end-to-end QoS guarantee, single-node QoS provisioning schemes have to be deployed at each router, and therefore, in this dissertation, such schemes are studied prior to the study of the end-to-end QoS provisioning mechanisms. Specifically, the effective sharing of the output bandwidth among the large amount of data flows is studied, so that fairness in the bandwidth allocation among the flows can be achieved in a scalable fashion. A dual-rate grouping architecture is proposed in this dissertation, in which the granularity in rate allocation can be enhanced, while the scalability of the one-rate grouping architecture is still maintained. It is demonstrated that the dual-rate grouping architecture approximates the ideal per-flow based PFQ architecture better than the one-rate grouping architecture, and provides better immunity capability. On the end-to-end QoS provisioning, a new Endpoint Admission Control scheme for Diffserv networks, referred to as Explicit Endpoint Admission Control (EEAC), is proposed, in which the admission control decision is made by the end hosts based on the end-to-end performance of the network. A novel concept, namely the service vector, is introduced, by which an end host can choose different services at different routers along its data path. Thus, the proposed service provisioning paradigm decouples the end-to-end QoS provisioning from the service provisioning at each router, and the end-to-end QoS granularity in the Diffserv networks can be enhanced, while the implementation complexity of the Diffserv model is maintained. Furthermore, several aspects of the implementation of the EEAC and service vector paradigm, referred to as EEAC-SV, in the Diffserv architecture are also investigated. The performance analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed EEAC-SV scheme, not only increases the benefit to the service users, but also enhances the benefit to the network service provider in terms of network resource utilization. The study also indicates that the proposed EEAC-SV scheme can provide a compatible and friendly networking environment to the conventional TCP flows, and the scheme can be deployed in the current Internet in an incremental and gradual fashion

User-Centric Quality of Service Provisioning in IP Networks

The Internet has become the preferred transport medium for almost every type of communication, continuing to grow, both in terms of the number of users and delivered services. Efforts have been made to ensure that time sensitive applications receive sufficient resources and subsequently receive an acceptable Quality of Service (QoS). However, typical Internet users no longer use a single service at a given point in time, as they are instead engaged in a multimedia-rich experience, comprising of many different concurrent services. Given the scalability problems raised by the diversity of the users and traffic, in conjunction with their increasing expectations, the task of QoS provisioning can no longer be approached from the perspective of providing priority to specific traffic types over coexisting services; either through explicit resource reservation, or traffic classification using static policies, as is the case with the current approach to QoS provisioning, Differentiated Services (Diffserv). This current use of static resource allocation and traffic shaping methods reveals a distinct lack of synergy between current QoS practices and user activities, thus highlighting a need for a QoS solution reflecting the user services. The aim of this thesis is to investigate and propose a novel QoS architecture, which considers the activities of the user and manages resources from a user-centric perspective. The research begins with a comprehensive examination of existing QoS technologies and mechanisms, arguing that current QoS practises are too static in their configuration and typically give priority to specific individual services rather than considering the user experience. The analysis also reveals the potential threat that unresponsive application traffic presents to coexisting Internet services and QoS efforts, and introduces the requirement for a balance between application QoS and fairness. This thesis proposes a novel architecture, the Congestion Aware Packet Scheduler (CAPS), which manages and controls traffic at the point of service aggregation, in order to optimise the overall QoS of the user experience. The CAPS architecture, in contrast to traditional QoS alternatives, places no predetermined precedence on a specific traffic; instead, it adapts QoS policies to each individual’s Internet traffic profile and dynamically controls the ratio of user services to maintain an optimised QoS experience. The rationale behind this approach was to enable a QoS optimised experience to each Internet user and not just those using preferred services. Furthermore, unresponsive bandwidth intensive applications, such as Peer-to-Peer, are managed fairly while minimising their impact on coexisting services. The CAPS architecture has been validated through extensive simulations with the topologies used replicating the complexity and scale of real-network ISP infrastructures. The results show that for a number of different user-traffic profiles, the proposed approach achieves an improved aggregate QoS for each user when compared with Best effort Internet, Traditional Diffserv and Weighted-RED configurations. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that the proposed architecture not only provides an optimised QoS to the user, irrespective of their traffic profile, but through the avoidance of static resource allocation, can adapt with the Internet user as their use of services change.France Teleco

Dynamic bandwidth allocation in multi-class IP networks using utility functions.

PhDAbstact not availableFujitsu Telecommunications Europe Lt

Quality-of-service management in IP networks

Quality of Service (QoS) in Internet Protocol (IF) Networks has been the subject of active research over the past two decades. Integrated Services (IntServ) and Differentiated Services (DiffServ) QoS architectures have emerged as proposed standards for resource allocation in IF Networks. These two QoS architectures support the need for multiple traffic queuing systems to allow for resource partitioning for heterogeneous applications making use of the networks. There have been a number of specifications or proposals for the number of traffic queuing classes (Class of Service (CoS)) that will support integrated services in IF Networks, but none has provided verification in the form of analytical or empirical investigation to prove that its specification or proposal will be optimum. Despite the existence of the two standard QoS architectures and the large volume of research work that has been carried out on IF QoS, its deployment still remains elusive in the Internet. This is not unconnected with the complexities associated with some aspects of the standard QoS architectures. [Continues.

Voice over IP

The area that this thesis covers is Voice over IP (or IP Telephony as it is sometimes called) over Private networks and not over the Internet. There is a distinction to be made between the two even though the term is loosely applied to both. IP Telephony over Private Networks involve calls made over private WANs using IP telephony protocols while IP Telephony over the Internet involve calls made over the public Internet using IP telephony protocols. Since the network is private, service is reliable because the network owner can control how resources are allocated to various applications, such as telephony services. The public Internet on the other hand is a public, largely unmanaged network that offers no reliable service guarantee. Calls placed over the Internet can be low in quality, but given the low price, some find this solution attractive. What started off as an Internet Revolution with free phone calls being offered to the general public using their multimedia computers has turned into a telecommunication revolution where enterprises are beginning to converge their data and voice networks into one network. In retrospect, an enterprise\u27s data networks are being leveraged for telephony. The communication industry has come full circle. Earlier in the decade data was being transmitted over the public voice networks and now voice is just another application which is/will be run over the enterprises existing data networks. We shall see in this thesis the problems that are encountered while sending Voice over Data networks using the underlying IP Protocol and the corrective steps taken by the Industry to resolve these multitudes of issues. Paul M. Zam who is collaborating in this Joint Thesis/project on VoIP will substantiate this theoretical research with his practical findings. On reading this paper the reader will gain an insight in the issues revolving the implementation of VoIP in an enterprises private network as well the technical data, which sheds more light on the same. Thus the premise of this joint thesis/project is to analyze the current status of the technology and present a business case scenario where an organization will be able to use this information