Transport of TCP/IP traffic over assured forwarding IP-differentiated services

The Internet is facing a twofold challenge: to increase network capacity in order to accommodate a steadily increasing number of users; to guarantee the quality of service for existing applications and for new multimedia applications requiring real-time network response. In order to meet these requirements, IETF is currently defining the differentiated service (DiffServ) architecture, which should offer a simple and scalable platform to guarantee differentiated QoS in the Internet. In the DiffServ domain, the assured forwarding service is designed to provide data applications with acceptable performance, overcoming the limits of the Internet's current best-effort service. Since data applications mostly rely on the TCP transport protocol, it is important to examine the interaction between the congestion avoidance and control mechanisms of TCP and assured forwarding. Our main purpose is to shed light on this interaction, and to show that, in the current DiffServ framework, poor performance of TCP traffic flows can result from the existing mismatch between the assured forwarding traffic conditioning procedures and the TCP congestion management. We propose a new adaptive packet marking policy to deal with congestion situations that may occur. We show that, with this policy, the provisioned rate for TCP flows can be achieved.