Efficient resource management for end-to-end QoS guarantees in DiffServ networks

The differentiated services (DiffServ) architecture has been proposed as a scalable solution for delivering end-to-end quality of service (QoS) guarantees over the Internet. While the scalability of the data plane emerges from the definition of only a small number of different service classes, the issue of a scalable control plane is still an open research problem. The initial proposal was to use a centralized agent, called bandwidth broker (BB), to manage the resources within each DiffServ domain and make local admission control decisions. We propose an alternative distributed approach, where the local admission decisions are made independently at the edge routers of each domain. We show, through simulation results, that this distributed approach can manage the network resources very efficiently, leading to lower bandwidth blocking rates when compared to traditional shortest path admission control. Moreover, its simplicity and distributed implementation make it a very scalable solution for resource management in DiffServ networks.