A pragmatic approach for service provisioning based on a small set of per-hop behaviors

In this paper we describe the implementation of a network providing advanced services such as a Premium service that aims at providing low loss, low delay, and low delay jitter and an Olympic service that allows for a service differentiation in terms of delay within three additional classes. Our implementation of this network is based on the Differentiated Services Architecture, which is the most recent approach of the Internet Engineering Task Force towards quality of service. Access to service classes is controlled by a bandwidth broker, which can perform traffic engineering by means of multiprotocol label switching. The Premium service is implemented as expedited forwarding and the Olympic service as a group of assured forwarding per-hop-behavior. We present a thorough evaluation of the proposed services implemented by the careful assignment of micro-flows to a small set of per-hop behaviors.