Absolute QoS Guarantees in a Relative Differentiated Services Architecture

In this paper we propose a new architecture that provides absolute QoS guarantees for the users, requires only per-class state at the edges of the network, generates only a small amount of overhead, and uses relative differentiated services architecture inside the domain. In our proposal the service provider offers a smaller number of classes for the end-users (or for other ISP-s) with absolute quality of service guarantees. Inside the domain relative service differentiation is used with a larger number of inner classes. The main idea is that the edge nodes assign a new inner class to the incoming packets considering the actual load of the domain in order to provide absolute QoS guarantees. The performance analysis of this architecture is carried out by simulation.