A generic traffic conditioning model for differentiated services

Differentiated services (DiffServ) are a set of technologies used to enable the provisioning of class-based, differentiated quality of services. One of the essential building blocks to realize DiffServ is the use of traffic conditioning mechanisms to support the required forwarding behaviors. In this paper, a generic model for traffic conditioning is proposed. The generic traffic conditioner (GTC) can be used to provide the traffic control functionalities required in support of various defined per-hop forwarding behaviors. To demonstrate this capability, a configuration of GTC for an expedited forwarding (EF) service that guarantees low packet loss, delay and jitter bounds is presented. Per-hop delay due to traffic conditioning is briefly analyzed. The GTC is currently implemented in a Linux platform Experimental results show that the GTC can achieve minimal packet loss with bounded jitter and delay.