Managing Quality-of-Service in Internet Applications Using Differentiated Services

Advances in networks during the past decades have fostered the deployment of a variety of Internet applications. Many of these applications have a range of Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements, some involving network throughput, delay, and reliability. Consequently, there is growing need for network services that can differentiate applications having QoS requirements from those without and to be able to further classify applications with QoS requirements into different classes at the IP-network level. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has proposed Differentiated Services (DiffServ) to provide QoS in IP-based networks. The goal of DiffServ is to define configurable types of packet forwarding that can provide service differentiation for large aggregates of network traffic. We report on our investigation of Relative Proportional Differentiated Services to implement DiffServ in IP-based networks and one that supports the provisioning and management of QoS for Internet Applications. The main contributions of the paper are the introduction of a novel traffic conditioning architecture for the marker and shaper/policer which relies on feedback from a metering component, and the provision for a QoS manager to enable a network administrator or a management application to dynamically adjust control parameters.