Providing packet loss guarantees in differentiated services architectures

The premium service and assured service are the first two types of services introduced within the DiffServ architecture. The premium service provides low delay and low jitter service by reserving the peak rate of user flows, thus is more expensive and is only used for high-demand application. Assured service provides customers with a relatively reliable service, but without any quantitative guarantee. We propose a new type of service, namely the loss guaranteed service, for the differentiated services architecture. The loss guaranteed service can provide a quantitative QoS guarantee in terms of loss rate without perflow based resource reservation. A signaling protocol conforming to the DiffServ model, along with a measurement-based admission control is designed to implement the loss guaranteed service. A simulation model has been developed to study the performance and viability of our proposed service model. The results show that the loss guaranteed service can achieve a high level of utilization while still reliably keeping packet loss within the desired target.