Aggregate flow control: improving assurances for differentiated services network

The differentiated services architecture is a simple, but novel, approach for providing service differentiation in an IP network. However, there are various issues to be addressed before any sophisticated end-to-end services can be offered. This work proposes an aggregate flow control (AFC) technique with a Diffserv traffic conditioner to improve the bandwidth and delay assurance of differentiated services. A prototype has been developed to study the end-to-end behavior of customer aggregates. In particular, this new approach improves performance in the following manner: (1) fairness issues among aggregated customer traffic with different number of micro-flows in an aggregate, interaction of non-responsive traffic (UDP) and responsive traffic (TCP), and the effect of different packet sizes in aggregates; (2) improved transactions per second for short TCP flows; and (3) reduced inter-packet delay variation for streaming UDP traffic. Experiments are also performed in a topology with multiple congestion points to show an improved treatment of conformant aggregates, and the ability of AFC to handle multiple aggregates and differing target rates.