Integration of a Traffic Conditioner for Differentiated Services in End-Systems via Feedback-Loops

More and more applications on the Internet would benefit from Quality of Service provisioning. Unfortunately, the IP-based Internet works according to a best-effort model and gives no QoS guarantees. Thus, the (compared to In­ tegrated Services) simple Differentiated Services architecture has been devel­ oped to provide a service better than best-effort. This paper presents compo­ nents of the Differentiated Services architecture and shows the benefits of lo­ cal pre-marking and traffic conditioning. This traffic conditioning is com­ bined with a feedback architecture and a simple user interface where a user can express his or her request for more QoS via a simple button. The traffic is formed in a way that QoS is supported and no packet is discarded or is down­ graded at the next domain. First results demonstrate the benefits of the ap­ proach in a real testbed.