Impact of quality of service horizontal integration in active nodes: modeling and implementation

Many papers have been written about quality of service integration in active nodes. However, all these works focused only on QoS vertical integration: QoS at active application layer, at active network layer or at "classical" network layer. We have already presented in (Fuin et al., 2004) our approach of QoS vertical integration at active network layer. In this paper, we focus on QoS horizontal integration of this solution in active nodes. In other words, we present impact of applying QoS policies before or after the active service execution. QoS management after execution environment is the traditional approach (classical IP network legacy), but we show in this paper that it is not always the best choice. Indeed, in active networks, this approach can lead to waste computing resources. We propose a second approach that is best suited to save these resources: QoS management before executing active services. We make some simulations using our model and some experiments using our implementation both showing that applying QoS before or after execution environment can give better results depending on active services used.