Performance evaluation of the architecture for end-to-end quality-of-service provisioning

Real-time communications services over the Internet need a new architecture to meet their required quality. From a viewpoint of quality of service provisioning architecture, the Internet can mainly be divided into three types of subnetworks: domain networks, access networks, and stub networks. In this article we focus on issues arising in the former two networks for end-to-end QoS provisioning. First, the access networks are of rather low-speed links, so delay is still of major concern. We examine the statistical delay bound through numerical results derived from our analysis. Schemes to reduce delay are proposed, and their performance is evaluated. Next, domain networks are likely to be of very high-speed links, which can accommodate a huge number of voice flows of low bit rates. Thus, effective flow management will be of major concern because per-flow management is a very costly proposition. Therefore, we pay attention to a flow aggregation scheme, and evaluate its performance by analyzing its blocking probability.