GTFRC, a TCP friendly QoS-aware rate control for diffserv assured service

This study addresses the end-to-end congestion control support over the DiffServ Assured Forwarding (AF) class. The resulting Assured Service (AS) provides a minimum level of throughput guarantee. In this context, this article describes a new end-to-end mechanism for continuous transfer based on TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC). The proposed approach modifies TFRC to take into account the QoS negotiated. This mechanism, named gTFRC, is able to reach the minimum throughput guarantee whatever the flow’s RTT and target rate. Simulation measurements and implementation over a real QoS testbed demonstrate the efficiency of this mechanism either in over-provisioned or exactly-provisioned network. In addition, we show that the gTFRC mechanism can be used in the same DiffServ/AF class with TCP or TFRC flows

gTFRC: a QoS-aware congestion control algorithm

This study addresses the end-to-end congestion control support over the DiffServ Assured Forwarding (AF) class. The resulting Assured Service (AS) provides a minimum level of throughput guarantee. In this context, this paper describes a new end-to-end mechanism for continuous transfer based on TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) originally proposed in [11]. The proposed approach modifies TFRC to take into account the QoS negotiated. This mechanism, named gTFRC, is able to reach the minimum throughput guarantee whatever the flow's RTT and target rate. Simulation measurements show the efficiency of this mechanism either in over-provisioned or exactly-provisioned network. In addition, we show that the gTFRC mechanism can be used in the same DiffServ/AF class with TCP or TFRC flows

Proportional bandwidth distribution in IP networks implementing the assured forwarding PHB

Recent demands for new applications are giving rise to an increasing need of Quality of Service (QoS). Nowadays, most IP-based networks tend to use the DiffServ architecture to provide end-to-end QoS. Traffic conditioners are a key element in the deployment of DiffServ. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for traffic conditioning based on feedback signaling among boundary nodes and traffic conditioners. This new approach is intended to provide a poportional distribution of excess bandwidth to endusers. We evaluate through extensive simulations the performance of our proposal in terms of final throughput, considering contracted target rates and distribution of spare bandwidth. Results show a high level of fairness in the excess bandwidth allocation among TCP sources under different network conditions

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

End-to-end TCP performance of the couple CBM traffic conditioner and RIO buffer management in a three node topology

Despite the abundant literature written about the AF PHB, no solution has been found to efficiently face up its two goals, assuring a minimum rate to the users and offering a fair distribution of the excess bandwidth if available. The Counters Based Modified (CBM) traffic conditioner, presented in a previous work, is able to achieve these objectives in single-node topologies. This paper raises issues with providing bandwidth assurance and spare bandwidth distribution for TCP flows in more complex topologies than usual. Simulation results explore the effect of target rates, round trip times, and efficiency of CBM when up to three network nodes implement service differentiation, including in some cases the coexistence of assured service and best-effort traffics.This work was supported by the Spanish Research Council under projects TEC2004-05622-C04-02/TCM and TIC2001-3339-C02-02

Counters-based modified traffic conditioner

Traffic conditioners play a key role in implementing the Assured Service in the framework of the DiffServ approach. Many research papers have focused on finding the best traffic conditioner able to assure contracted target rates and to fairly distribute the excess bandwidth among competing sources. Nevertheless, none of the proposals presented so far accomplishes simultaneously both features. We propose a traffic conditioner for the Internet Assured Service called Counters-Based Modified (CBM) that strictly guarantees target rates and performs a fair share of the excess bandwidth among TCP Reno sources. The ability of strictly providing the inbound bandwidth is inherited from its predecessor the Counters-Based algorithm, and the fairness in the outbound bandwidth distribution is met by probabilistically dropping OUT packets in the traffic conditioner. To determine the dropping probability of an OUT packet, the amount of excess bandwidth and the average RTT of all connections in the traffic conditioner have to be known. Although this fact implies using some sort of signaling, it results more feasible than other proposed intelligent traffic conditioners. The CBM traffic conditioner is evaluated under different conditions by simulation using TCP Reno sources. Simulation results presented in this paper lead us to suggest it as a feasible election for the traffic conditioner device implementation in DiffServ.This work was supported by the Spanish Research Council under grant FAR-IP TIC2000-1734-C03-03

Design and evaluation of an adaptive traffic conditioner in differentiated services networks

Abstract—We design and evaluate an adaptive traffic conditioner to improve application performance over the differentiated services assured forwarding behavior. The conditioner is adaptive because the marking algorithm changes based upon the current number of flows traversing through an edge router. If there are a small number of flows, the conditioner maintains and uses state information to intelligently protect critical TCP packets. On the other hand, if there are many flows going through the edge router, the conditioner only uses flow characteristics as indicated in the TCP packet headers to mark without requiring per flow state. Simulation results indicate that this adaptive conditioner improves throughput of data extensive applications like large FTP transfers, and achieves low packet delays and response times for Telnet and WWW traffic. I

A new proposal for assuring services in internet

In this paper we present a new mechanism to provide an assured service in terms of target rate and fair excess bandwidth, like the Internet Assured Service. Research in Internet Assured Service faced up both questions in separate ways proposing different traffic conditioners to work with the RIO buffer management, and proposing different modifications to this buffer management, among others. In this work, we suggest using a buffer management scheme different from RIO that also treats in-of-profile and out-of-profile packets differently but avoiding interference between them. This scheme is used together with the Counters Based traffic conditioner because of its high accuracy in guaranteeing target rates. We evaluate and compare by simulation the performance of our proposal using TCP RENO sources. One important issue to be considered is that the proposal is a feasible alternative to the standard architecture for Differentiated Services in Internet.This work was supported by the Spanish Research Council under grant TIC2000-1734- C03-03