Core-Stateless Forwarding With QoS Revisited: Decoupling Delay and Bandwidth Requirements

Abstract

Network QoS, fairness and resource sharing control are not completely solved problems. Available solutions lack scalability due to maintaining flow state, require re-tuning if traffic changes, focus on a limited set of networking scenarios or require complex, centralized controllers and feedback loops. In this paper, we propose a core-stateless solution for closed network domains like access, enterprise and data center networks that handles resource sharing and provides guarantees for per-hop latency, independently. The proposed method enables controlled resource sharing by encoding the utility function of flows to Packet Value markings. This allows expressing resource sharing policies for all possible congestion situations, while operation is completely flow unaware inside the network. In addition, it also satisfies per-hop delay requirements for traffic flows independently. The separation of the delay requirements of the packets from their importance has not generally been possible by existing methods so far. The performance of the proposed method has thoroughly been analyzed by large number of simulations covering both static and dynamic scenarios and was implemented in a cloud-native virtual router implementing all the policies needed for a Broadband Network Gateway, showing good performance and better scalability than existing weighted queuing-based solutions.