A Generic Traffic Conditioning Model for Differentiated Services

Differentiated service (Diffserv) is a set of technologies used to enable the provisioning of class-based, differentiated quality of service. One of the essential building blocks to realize Diffserv is the use of traffic conditioning mechanisms to support the required forwarding behavior. In this paper, a generic model for traffic conditioning is proposed. The generic traffic conditioner (GTC) can be used to provide the traffic control functionality required in support of various defined per-hop forwarding behaviors. To demonstrate this capability, a configuration of GTC for an expedited forwarding that guarantees low packet loss, delay and jitter bounds is presented. Analysis of per-hop delay and jitter due to conditioning traffic is presented and buffer requirements for GTC and interface are also derived. The GTC is currently implemented in Linux platform. Experimental results have shown that the GTC can achieve minimal packet loss with bounded jitter and delay. Keywords— Quality-of-Service Network, Differentiated services, Traffic Conditioning