Accommodations of QoS DiffServ over IP and MPLS networks

Multicasting has become increasingly important with the emergence of Internet-based applications such IP telephony, audio/video conferencing, distributed databases and software upgrading. IP Multicasting is an efficient way to distribute information from a single source to multiple destinations at different locations. In practice IP is considered as a layer 3 protocol. Multiprotocol label Switching (MPLS) replaces the IP forwarding by a simple label lookup. MPLS combines the flexibility of layer 3 routing and layer 2 switching. In this paper, we present a new fair share policy (FSP) that implements Differentiated Services to solve the problems of QoS and congestion control when multicasting is used. Analysis tools are used to evaluate our new fair share policy (FSP) for different scenarios. The results should provide insights for the comparisons between IP multicast in MPLS networks using FSP and plain IP multicasting using the same policy when DiffServ are adopted. Key-Words: Multicast, IP, MPLS, DiffServ, QoS.