A Feedback Control Extension to Differentiated Services

This draft presents a Feedback Control extension to Differentiated Services. Differentiated Services have been designed for scalability through handling aggregates of traffic instead of individual flows as in the Integrated Services. However, it has been observed that the DS mechanism in some situations can hardly achieve the desired quality of service and may result in unfair conditions. To remedy these problems, this draft describes a general feedback control paradigm that enables a network provider to impose a control mechanism upon their DS domain. As an instance of the general framework, a feedback control mechanism is proposed. Our simulation analysis demonstrates that the overall feedback controlled DS can offer a better resource utilisation and a fair resource sharing. Such control mechanism can also help enforce the desired service assurances. This document is intended to stimulate discussion in this direction. Further work is required to carefully define a set of primitive requirements that enables interoperability. The pdf and ps version of this document are available at: http://www.comm.utoronto.ca/~keith/ietf-id/draft-chow-diffserv-fbctrl-00.pdf, .ps and recommended for the figures it contains. INTERNET-DRAFT draft-chow-diffserv-fbctrl-00.txt, .ps, .pdf March 1999 Chow, et. al. Expires: September 1999 Page 2