Providing Scalable Support for Multiple QoS Guarantees: Architecture and Mechanisms

Yiwei Thomas HOU  Zhenhai DUAN  Zhi-Li ZHANG  Takafumi CHUJO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E84-B   No.10   pp.2830-2849
Publication Date: 2001/10/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Internet
Keyword: 
quality of service (QoS),  differentiated services (Diffserv),  scheduling,  bandwidth broker,  scalability,  

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Summary: 
The IETF Differentiated Services (DiffServ) framework achieves scalability by (1) aggregating traffic flows with coarse grain QoS on the data plane, and (2) allocating network resources with a bandwidth broker (BB) on the control plane. However, there are many issues that need to be addressed under such framework. First, it has been shown that the concatenation of strict priority (SP) scheduler of class-based queues (CBQ) can cause delay jitter unbounded under certain utilization, which is not acceptable to support the premium service (PS). Furthermore, it is not clear how such a DiffServ network can support traffic flows requiring the guaranteed service (GS), which is a desirable feature of the future Internet. This paper presents architecture and mechanisms to support multiple QoS under the DiffServ paradigm. On the data plane, we present a node architecture based on the virtual time reference system (VTRS). The key building block of our node architecture is the core-stateless virtual clock (CSVC) scheduling algorithm, which, in terms of providing delay guarantee, has the same expressive power as a stateful weighted fair queueing (WFQ) scheduler. With the CSVC scheduler as our building block, we design a node architecture that is capable of supporting integrated transport of the GS, the PS, the assured service (AS), and the traditional best effort (BE) service. On the control plane, we present a BB architecture to provide flexible resource allocation and QoS provisioning. Simulation results demonstrate that our architecture and mechanisms can provide scalable and flexible transport of integrated traffic of the GS, the PS, the AS, and the BE services.