Framework for parameter mapping to provide end-to-end QoS guarantees in IntServ/DiffServ architectures

Abstract

With the numerous emerging real-time and multimedia applications, there has been much interest for developing mechanisms which enable real-time services over the Internet. These applications have QoS requirements. From the end-user's point of view, QoS should be supported end-to-end between any pair of hosts; so all elements along the path must participate in special treatment for packets to provide the required QoS. One of the promising configurations to support real-time traffics is by combining capabilities of IntServ and DiffServ architectures. However, guaranteeing end-to-end QoS over such architectures—generally composed of chains of multiple independently administered IntServ and DiffServ domains—requires the deployment of several mechanisms and many untaken steps remain on the road to achieving this. In particular, multiple networks (domains), forming a region, may consider different QoS parameters and/or manage them differently. In this paper, we deal with the problem of mapping QoS parameters and establish conditions for the guarantee of end-to-end QoS. A (generic) framework is proposed to easy the analysis of QoS mapping between Internet domains. Abstract functions are proposed to contribute to the definition of a formal system for reasoning on QoS requirements and on the relationships between QoS requirements and Service Level Specification.