Fair Stateless Aggregate Marking Techniques for Differentiated Services Networks

In heterogeneous networks such as today’s Internet, the differentiated services architecture for providing scalable service differentiation, has proved to be a practical and easily deployable method for providing Quality-of-Services. In this paper, we focus on the issue of packet marking in diffserv networks. We specifically look at developing fair aggregate markers which do not need to maintain per-flow state. We propose two new probabilistic marking strategies to enable fair token distribution among individual flows of an aggregate. The first marker, Probabilistic Aggregate Marker (PAM), uses the Token Bucket burst size to probabilistically mark incoming packets and ensure proportional fair marking among the flows. The second marker, Stateless Aggregate Fair Marker (SAFM) approximates fair queuing techniques to isolate flows while marking packets of the aggregate, and distributes tokens evenly among the flows without maintaining per-flow state. Our simulation results show that the two fair marking strategies show considerable improvement over standard token bucket techniques while marking flow aggregates. Keywords— Diffserv, Fairness, Aggregate Traffic Marking, Internet, Congestion Control