Augmenting DiffServ operations with dynamically learned classes of services

Abstract

In this work, we provide a Machine Learning framework for augmenting the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) protocol with fine-grained dynamic traffic classification. The framework is called L-DiffServ. It is composed of two classification algorithms able to detect the QoS classes of incoming packets only looking at three packet header fields; the first algorithm, referred to as Inter-L-DiffServ, is a semi-supervised classification procedure able to replicate DiffServ classification; the second one, referred to as Intra-L-DiffServ, is an unsupervised algorithm for intra-class classification, useful for classes taking large portions of the overall traffic. We apply the latter to the low priority best-effort class. The performance evaluation shows that our solution is able to dynamically classify packets and to detect new QoS sub-classes hence adapting to traffic aggregate characteristics. We also show that network resource management can be improved exploiting the new generated QoS sub-classes: two active queue management algorithms based on WRED and CHOKe show a reduction of the number of sessions affected by packet losses up to 40% with respect to the legacy DiffServ procedure.