Realizing throughput guarantees in a differentiated services network

This paper discusses techniques for achieving desired throughput guarantees in the Internet that supports a differentiated services framework. The diff-serv framework proposes the use of different drop precedences to achieve service guarantees over the Internet. However, it has been observed that the drop precedences by themselves cannot achieve the desired target rates because of the strong interaction of the transport protocol with packet drops in the network. This paper proposes and evaluates a number of techniques to better achieve the throughput guarantees in such networks. The proposed techniques consider: modifying the transport protocol at the sender; modifying the marking strategies at the marker; and modifying the dropping policies at the router. It is shown that these techniques improve the likelihood of achieving the desired throughput guarantees and also improve the service differentiation.