Providing differentiated service from an Internet server

Differentiated service has been proposed as a potential solution for bandwidth allocation and is expected to be supported in the next-generation Internet. However, a service-differentiating Internet with best-effort servers may not meet the overall goals of the differentiated service. In this paper, approaches and performance issues on providing differentiated services from an Internet server are studied. Experimental study and analyses prove that under near-saturation of server utilization, differentiating service provides significantly better performance to high priority tasks compared to a traditional service mode. Quantitative performance estimation of different priority levels of tasks is presented. It is also observed that an enhanced shortest queue first task assignment scheme helps in decreasing the average response time of the server system.