EF PHB Research Articles

A Design of The PHB Mapping Model for Combining Services with DiffServ in The MPLS Network

This study proposed the PHB mapping model for combining services with DiffServ in the MPLS network capable of high-speed switching, and the effective differential bandwidth service model in the MPLS network on the basis of the proposed mapping model. The result of simulation on the service model using PRI showed that the transmission rate was achieved as much as the assigned bandwidth regardless of the increase of traffic as far as the EF PHB did not exceed the assigned bandwidth at the peak rate when the overall traffic increased.

Per-domain packet scale rate guarantee for expedited forwarding

The expedited forwarding per-hop behavior (EF PHB) was recently replaced by a new definition, called packet scale rate guarantee (PSRG), under the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) framework. This replacement raises two challenges. One is the implementation of a PSRG server. Another is the provision of per-domain PSRG. Specifically, for the former, an open issue is whether hierarchical schedulers can provide PSRG; for the latter, it is not clear whether and how per-domain PSRG can be provided in the presence of flow aggregation. Since, in DiffServ networks, flow aggregation is a natural phenomenon and hierarchical scheduling is high-likely desired, these two challenges become even more critical. To address the first challenge, we introduce a new concept called latency-rate worst-case service guarantee (LR-WSG). We prove that, if a server provides LR-WSG, it also provides PSRG. We show that many well-known schedulers support LR-WSG, which include not only one-level schedulers but also their hierarchical versions. To address the second challenge, we first prove that PSRG can be extended from per-node to per-domain if no flow aggregation is performed. The proof is notable in that it depends solely on the concept of PSRG itself. We then investigate the provision of per-domain PSRG in presence of flow aggregation. We propose to use packet scale fair aggregator (PSFA) to aggregate flows. We show that, with PSFA, per-domain PSRG can be provided in spite of flow aggregation. We finally provide a brief discuss on the viability of using PSFA in DiffServ networks and define an expedited forwarding per-domain behavior (EF PDB).

IP QoS across multiple management domains: practical experiences from pan-European experiments

GEANT is the pan-European 10 Gbs network interconnecting European national research and educational networks (NRENs). A Premium IP service based on the DiffServ EF PHB has been specified and implemented for this environment to provide quality of service to selected user groups on a Europe-wide scale. Basic features of Premium IP are described, and results from early experiments in the production networks of GEANT and the NRENs are presented. Next steps are proposed for achieving a fast and wide availability of Premium IP in the European research networks.

Delay jitter bounds and packet scale rate guarantee for expedited forwarding

We consider the definition of the expedited forwarding per-hop behavior (EF PHB) as given in RFC 2598 and its impact on worst case end-to-end delay jitter. On the one hand, the definition in RFC 2598 can be used to predict extremely low end-to-end delay jitter, independent of the network scale. On the other hand, we find that the worst case delay jitter can be made arbitrarily large, while each flow traverses at most a specified number of hops, if we allow networks to become arbitrarily large; this is in contradiction with the previous statement. We analyze where the contradiction originates and find the explanation. It resides in the fact that the definition in RFC 2598 is not easily implementable in schedulers we know of, mainly because it is not formal enough, and also because it does not contain an error term. We propose a new definition for the EF PHB, called packet scale rate guarantee (PSRG) that preserves the spirit of RFC 2598 while allowing a number of reasonable implementations and has very useful properties for per-node and end-to-end network engineering. We show that this definition implies a rate-latency service curve property. We also show that it is equivalent, in some sense, to the stronger concept of adaptive service guarantee. Then we propose some proven bounds on delay jitter for networks implementing this new definition, both in cases without loss and with loss.

Performance study of bandwidth reallocation algorithms for dynamic provisioning in differentiated services networks

This paper proposed five bandwidth reallocation algorithms (BRAs) that can be applied to the quantitative provisioning in a differentiated services (DS) network supporting dynamic provisioning. At each node in the DS domain, quantitative traffic is classified into EF PHB and AF11_ quantitative-assured PHB. The bandwidth reallocation process for quantitative provisioning is separated into two stages. The first stage is to manage the quantitative provisioning for the EF PHB and the second stage is to manage the quantitative provisioning for the AF11_ quantitative-assured PHB. Basic concepts and the detailed flowcharts of the proposed BRAs are presented. The performances of all five proposed BRAs are evaluated and compared under various network topologies as well as network congestion conditions. Finally, some concluding remarks based on this study are given to help network administrators in understanding the complex bandwidth reallocation problem for dynamic provisioning in DS networks.