Exploring the Performance Impact of QoS Support in TCP/IP Protocol Stacks

Abstract

Significant efforts are being made by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to enhance the service model of the Internet to support integrated services for voice, video, and data transport. This is being done via a new resource reservation protocol (RSVP) and associated service classes for handling of traffic at network routers and end hosts. Given that the new service model is expected to be widely deployed and utilized, it is important to understand the extent and nature of overheads imposed relative to the best-effort data path. This paper explores the performance impact of supporting QoS guarantees on communication in TCP/IP protocol stacks at end hosts, in the context of an RSVP-based QoS architecture for an integrated services Internet developed and implemented earlier by the authors. We first demonstrate the efficacy of the architecture in providing the desired QoS to individual connections via application-level experiments on an ATM network. In these experiments we show th..