Jungle Issues in Class-Based Routing

The main contribution of this paper is the evaluation, on a prototype, of a class-based intra-domain routing strategy using traffic patterns and workloads based on actual Internet traffic measurements. The particular case addressed is the evaluation of the impact of the lifetime of the flows on routing and traffic performance. The importance of this issue is due to the fact that class-based routing, naturally used in the Differentiated Services framework, does not include flow handling capabilities. This study is conducted on the Quality of Service routing protocol for the Differentiated Services framework developed at the University of Coimbra. A set of mechanisms is used to control the performance, including the quantification of metrics and distribution of routing information subject to a relative threshold and to a hold-down timer. The results obtained show that class-based routing is able, in the test network used, to reduce the problems that long-lived flows experience without violating the class based paradigm.