Stateless RD Network Services

Abstract. Rate-Delay (RD) Network Services constitute a promising differentiated-services architecture for multi-provider networks, by of-fering users a choice between high throughput or low queuing delay at bottleneck links. An RD router provides service differentiation via trans-mission scheduling and by managing two FIFO queues. To ensure strict delay bounds, an RD router tracks arrival times of packets in the D service queue, and discards late packets at the queue head. However, maintaining the per-packet state is undesirable for complexity and cost reasons. In this paper, we present a Stateless RD (S-RD) router design that provides low queuing delay to the D service exclusively via buffer dimensioning, without requiring any per-packet state. After proving an-alytically that the S-RD design meets the delay guarantees, we use sim-ulation to evaluate the performance of the stateless design, confirming that S-RD routers preserve the delay bounds of RD network services. As case studies, we consider Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and Web browsing as particular examples of Internet applications. The extensive simulation results demonstrate that S-RD Network Services significantly improve VoIP quality and increase the goodput of short-lived Web flows, without degrading the throughput of long-lived flows