On the impact of policing and rate guarantees in DiffServ networks: a video streaming application perspective

Over the past few years, there have been a number of proposals aimed at introducing different levels of service in the Internet. One of the more recent proposals is the Differentiated Services (Diff-Serv) architecture, and in this paper we explore how the policing actions and associated rate guarantees provided by the Expedited Forwarding (EF) translate into perceived benefits for applications that are the presumed users of such enhancements. Specifically, we focus on video streaming applications that arguably have relatively strong service quality requirements, and which should, therefore, stand to benefit from the availability of some form of enhanced service. Our goal is to gain a better understanding of the relation that exists between application level quality measures and the selection of the network level parameters that govern the delivery of the guarantees that an EF based service would provide. Our investigation, which is experimental in nature, relies on a number of standard streaming video servers and clients that have been modified and instrumented to allow quantification of the perceived quality of the received video stream. Quality assessments are performed using a Video Quality Measurement tool based on the ANSI objective quality standard. Measurements were made over both a local Diff-Serv testbed and across the QBone, a QoS enabled segment of the Internet2 infrastructure. The paper reports and analyzes the results of those measurements.

[1]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  Quality adaptation for congestion controlled video playback over the Internet , 1999, SIGCOMM '99.

[2]  Fred Baker,et al.  Assured Forwarding PHB Group , 1999, RFC.

[3]  Roch Guérin,et al.  A Two Rate Three Color Marker , 1999, RFC.

[4]  Jean-Yves Le Boudec,et al.  Delay jitter bounds and packet scale rate guarantee for expedited forwarding , 2002, TNET.

[5]  Jean-Yves Le Boudec,et al.  Optimal smoothing for guaranteed service , 2000, TNET.

[6]  Van Jacobson,et al.  An Expedited Forwarding PHB , 1999, RFC.

[7]  Margaret H. Pinson,et al.  On the impact of policing and rate guarantees in DiffServ networks: a video streaming application perspective , 2001, SIGCOMM 2001.

[8]  Rae Baxter,et al.  Acknowledgments.-The authors would like to , 1982 .

[9]  David L. Black,et al.  Definition of the Differentiated Services Field (DS Field) in the IPv4 and IPv6 Headers , 1998, RFC.

[10]  Margaret H. Pinson,et al.  Spatial-temporal distortion metric for in-service quality monitoring of any digital video system , 1999, Optics East.

[11]  Sugato Chakravarty,et al.  Methodology for the subjective assessment of the quality of television pictures , 1995 .

[12]  Roch Guérin,et al.  A Single Rate Three Color Marker , 1999, RFC.

[13]  Vern Paxson,et al.  Framework for IP Performance Metrics , 1998, RFC.

[14]  Zheng Wang,et al.  An Architecture for Differentiated Services , 1998, RFC.

[15]  Jean-Yves Le Boudec,et al.  Delay jitter bounds and packet scale rate guarantee for expedited forwarding , 2001, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2001. Conference on Computer Communications. Twentieth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Society (Cat. No.01CH37213).

[16]  M. Hemy.  MPEG System Streams in Best-Effort Networks , 1999 .

[17]  P. F. Chimento,et al.  A measurement-based analysis of expedited forwarding PHB mechanisms , 2000, 2000 Eighth International Workshop on Quality of Service. IWQoS 2000 (Cat. No.00EX400).