Deployment of Class-based Routing in Wide Area Networks: Overhead and Performance Assessment

A Quality of Service (QoS) routing protocol for the Differentiated Services framework is being developed at the University of Coimbra (UC-QoSR). The main contribution of this paper is the evaluation of the protocol in wide area networks concerning traffic performance and protocol overhead. Many interesting QoS routing proposals have been proposed. However their evaluation has been conducted in majority by simulation. In this paper, we evaluate a QoS routing proposal using a prototype in an emulated Wide Area environment and compare the results with the Local Area scenario. The results show that it is feasible and cost rewarding to use QoS routing in order to improve the performance of QoS aware traffic in the actual existing Internet. The results also show that, besides being feasible, the QoS routing strategy proposed plays a major role in traffic performance both at the local and wide area environment, without imposing excessive performance costs and overhead in the network.