Cost minimization study of semi-elastic flows using Internet

Because of the dramatic growth of the Internet and the requirement of quality of service (QoS) guarantees for new and future applications it is essential that the Internet ensures end-to-end QoS. To provide this level of QoS, many protocols have evolved in the last few years, and some end-to-end QoS architectures have been proposed to mix all of these protocols appropriately. Also, it is necessary to classify applications by QoS requirements to understand how they may reserve resources from the network. In this paper, we briefly review the existing end-to-end QoS protocols and an end-to-end QoS architecture that combines all of them. In addition, we classify Internet data flows by their QoS requirements. We focus our interest on the study of semi-elastic flows and the minimization of their transmission cost. First, we present a client-server system to transmit these flows while reducing the cost. Also, we analyze the buffer management required at the client. Finally, we implement the system in the Network Simulator 2 to demonstrate that our analytical study can be used in a real system in an efficient manner to minimize the cost.