Quality of service support in differentiated services packet networks

During the past few years, new types of Internet applications which require performance beyond the best-effort service that is provided by the current Internet have emerged. These applications include the transmission of voice and video, which require a fixed end-to-end delay bound in order for the end-user to perceive an acceptable level of service quality. The differentiated services (DiffServ) model has been proposed to enhance the traditional best-effort service, and provide certain quality of service (QoS) guarantees to these applications. Its current definition, however, does not allow for a high level of flexibility or assurance and, therefore, it can not be widely deployed. We introduce a new protocol for a DiffServ architecture which provides a simple and efficient solution to the above problem. It is a complete protocol, in the sense that it deals with the issues of packet scheduling, admission control, and congestion control. We show, through experimental results, that our proposed protocol can improve the flexibility and assurance provided by current solutions, while maintaining a high level of network utilization.