Translation of specification units between IP and ATM quality of service declarations

An integral part of any network Quality of Service (QoS) system are its QoS declarations. QoS declarations consist of service classes, parameters, and specification units. QoS declarations are a component of the QoS architecture, as such they are a source of heterogeneity stemming from the fact that different QoS systems may be based on different QoS architectures and thus use different QoS declarations. A particular problem in that domain is the translation of specification units for QoS systems that are based on different forwarding technologies with respect to variable vs. fixed packet sizes, i.e., packet vs. cell switching. This is a problem that can be dealt with generically such that its solution can be applied to several situations of technically heterogeneous QoS systems like an RSVP/IntServor DiffServover an ATM-based system. While straightforward translations have been proposed, we investigate how more efficient translations can be achieved by using a slight but effective modification of existing AAL framing schemes as well as making use of statistical knowledge about packet size distributions.