DiffServ experiments: analysis of the premium service over the Alcatel-NCSU Internet2 testbed

In the Internet2 community, there is a heightened level of activity both in the development of advanced applications that require quality of service (QoS) for operating effectively and the enabling network infrastructure over long distances. As members of this community and leading technologists in Internet, Alcatel and North Carolina State University (NCSU) have jointly launched a fully operational virtual Lab between Alcatel's Research & Innovation Center in Richardson, TX and NCSU campus at Raleigh, NC across the Internet2 national backbone network. We report the first set of results from a Differentiated services (DiffServ) field trial over this large-scale testbed involving network equipment from Alcatel and other third party vendors. Results of the experiment show that DiffServ is capable of delivering the premium service using its expedited forwarding per hop behaviour (EF PHB) for a large class of bandwidth starving applications. However, it is found that DiffServ needs some additional mechanisms to efficiently deliver similar services for jitter and delay sensitive applications, especially in a severely congested network.