An efficient bandwidth management scheme for real-time Internet applications

Differentiated services (DiffServ) has been proposed as a scalable solution for Internet QoS. Within the DiffServ architecture, premium services is a service class which is proposed for interactive real-time applications such as real-time voice and video over the Internet. In order to ensure the service quality of premium services, each DiffServ domain need to appropriately negotiate a service level agreement (SLA) with its customers and neighboring domains. Because the resources for premium service are usually a small part of the total network bandwidth, dynamic SLA negotiation is preferred to maximize the resource utilization. However, a completely dynamic SLA negotiation scheme introduces a scalability problem for the bandwidth broker (BB). We introduce the concept of the "pipe" as a viable solution that avoids the scalability problem while managing the Internet bandwidth efficiently. A threshold-based updating scheme for the pipe is used which minimizes the updating overhead for the BB while maintaining a high utilization for the pipe.