Adaptive marking for aggregated flows

Abstract— The differentiated services architecture is receiving wide attention as a framework for providing different levels of service according to a service profile in the Internet. The current architecture allows aggregated flows sharing a service profile. This paper looks at the problem of achieving specific QoS goals of individual flows by flexibly managing resources available to an aggregated source. We derive a simple analytic model for the relationship between per-session behavior, aggregate packet marking and packet differentiation within a diff-serv network. The paper presents an adaptive marker based on a TCP performance model within a diff-serv network. The paper shows that an aggregated marker can maintain state of individual flows at the edge of the network and utilize this state effectively in adaptively marking packets of individual flows to meet their QoS goals.