Towards Better Support of Transaction Oriented Communication in Differentiated Services Networks

Applications using transaction oriented communication have special requirements. Packet forwarding of a client’s request and a server’s response should be as fast as possible and also highly reliable. This implies employment of a communication service supplying minimal end-toend delay and minimal packet loss. Currently defined per-hop forwarding behaviors (PHBs) and per-domain behaviors (PDBs) within Differentiated Services networks do not support these requirements of bursty traffic well enough. This paper proposes a new PHB and a suitable PDB called “Quick Forwarding” to fulfill the previously described requirements. Results of simulations are presented for evaluation of the newly proposed behavior and show that it performs better than other behaviors based on Expedited Forwarding or Assured Forwarding. This is a first step towards better support for this important class of applications.