A scalable share differentiation architecture for elastic and real-time traffic

Today's Internet lacks the mechanisms necessary for traffic isolation (to divide resources fairly) and differentiation (to allocate resources to users according to their willingness to pay). In this work, we present a new architecture for relative service differentiation, scalable share differentiation (SSD), which allocates network resources on a user basis and properly provides for both elastic and real-time traffic isolation and meaningful differentiation. SSD does not require the storage of any per-flow or per-user information at the core nodes and is inherently designed to work without admission control, making it easier to deploy and manage. In addition, we present a way to provide more fine-grained flow control to users without changing the concepts of SSD, which permits users to choose different priorities for their packets/flows. This allows the integration of a novel concept for improving the service quality given to user flows: user-based admission control. With user-based admission control, the network is unaware of admission control decisions, and the user himself can perform the tasks of accepting, rejecting and prioritizing flows.