Traffic sensitive quality of service controller

by Kumar, Abhishek Anand.

Internet applications have varied Quality of Service (QoS) Requirements. Traditional applications such as FTP and email are throughput sensitive since their quality is primarily affected by the throughput they receive. There are delay sensitive applications such as streaming audio/video and IP telephony, whose quality is more affected by the delay. The current Internet however does not provide QoS support to the applications and treats the packets from all applications as primarily throughput sensitive. Delay sensitive applications can however sacrifice throughput for delay to obtain better quality. We present a Traffic Sensitive QoS controller (TSQ) which can be used in conjunction with many existing Active Queue Management (AQM) techniques at the router. The applications inform the TSQ enabled router about their delay sensitivity by embedding a delay hint in the packet header. The delay hint is a measure of an application’s delay sensitivity. The TSQ router on receiving packets provides a lower queueing delay to packets from delay sensitive applications based on the delay hint. It also increases the drop probability of such applications thus decreasing their throughput and preventing any unfair advantage over throughput sensitive applications. We have also presented the quality metrics of some typical Internet applications in terms of delay and throughput. The applications are free to choose their delay hints based on the quality they receive. We evaluated TSQ in conjunction with the PI-controller AQM over the Network Simulator (NS-2). We have presented our results showing the improvement in QoS of applications due to the presence of TSQ.