Quality-of-Service Mechanisms for Flow-Based Routers

Abstract

In this paper, we propose quality of service mechanisms for flow-based routers which have to handle several million flows at wire speed in high-speed networks. Traffic management mechanisms are proposed for guaranteed traffic and non-guaranteed traffic separately, and then the effective harmonization of the two mechanisms is introduced for real networks in which both traffic types are mixed together. A simple non-work-conserving fair queuing algorithm is proposed for guaranteed traffic, and an adaptive flow-based random early drop algorithm is proposed for non-guaranteed traffic. Based on that basic architecture, we propose a dynamic traffic identification method to dynamically prioritize traffic according to the traffic characteristics of applications. In a high-speed router system, the dynamic traffic identification method could be a good alternative to deep packet inspection, which requires handling of the IP packet header and payload. Through numerical analysis, simulation, and a real system experiment, we demonstrate the performance of the proposed mechanisms.