End-to-End Quality of Service Support

Per-flow signalling extension across DiffServ domains

This paper describes a framework devised to extend per-flow admission control operation across Differentiated Services domains. Although the specific case of interoperability with RSVP is under discussion, our proposal can be easily adapted to other hop-by-hop signalling protocols. In our framework, DiffSery border routers accomplish three tasks. First, during the set-up phase, flows are mapped onto PHB groups on the basis of their QoS and traffic specifications. Second, signalling packets are tunnelled into IP packets marked as “probes”, where the “probe” marking is a DCSP value associated to the considered PHB Group. Third, when the flow set-up is complete, flow data packets are marked as…

Performance evaluation of a measurement-based algorithm for distributed admission control in a DiffServ framework

Distributed Admission Control in IP DiffServ environments is an emerging and promising research area. Distributed admission control solutions share the idea that no coordination among network routers (i.e. explicit signaling) is necessary, when the decision whether to admit or reject a new offered flow is pushed to the edge of the IP network. Proposed solutions differ in the degree of complexity required in internal network routers, and result in a different robustness and effectiveness in controlling the accepted traffic. This paper builds on a recently proposed distributed admission control solution, called GRIP (Gauge&Gate Reservation with Independent Probing), designed to integrate the …

Endpoint Admission Control over Assured Forwarding PHBs and Its Performance over RED Implementations

The Assured Forwarding Per Hop Behavior (AF PHB) has been devised by the IETF Differentiated Services (DiffServ) working group to provide drop level differentiation. The intent of AF is to support services with different loss requirements, but with no strict delay and jitter guarantees. Another suggested use of AF is to provide differentiated support for traffic conforming to an edge conditioning/policing scheme with respect to nonconforming traffic. Scope of this paper is twofold. First, we show that, quite surprisingly, a standard AF PHB class is semantically capable of supporting per flow admission control. This is obtained by adopting the AF PHB as core routers forwarding mechanism in c…

Quality of Service Multicasting over Differentiated Services Networks

This paper proposes a solution to support real-time multicast traffic with Quality of Service (QoS) constraints over Differentiated Services (DiffServ) IP networks. Our solution allows multicast users to dynamically join and leave the multicast tree. Moreover, it allows a multicast user which has negotiated a best-effort session to upgrade to a QoS-enabled session. Our solution is backward compatible with the Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) scheme. It combines two ideas. First, resource availability along a new QoS path is verified via a probe-based approach. Second, QoS is maintained by marking replicated packets with a special DSCP value, before forwarding them on the QoS path.

A Migration Path for the Internet: From Best-Effort to a QoS Capable Infrastructure by Means of Localized Admission Control

Looking back at many proposals appeared on the scene in these years, a fundamental lesson to be learned is that their success or failure is strictly tied to their backward compatibility with existing infrastructures. In this paper, we consider the problem of providing explicit admission control decisions for QoS aware services. We rely the decision to admit a new flow upon the successful and timely delivery, through the Internet, of probe packets independently generated by the end points. Our solution, called GRIP (Gauge&Gate Realistic Internet Protocol), is fully distributed and scalable, as admission control decisions are taken at the edge network nodes, and no coordination between router…