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