Scheduling for Proportional Differentiated Services on the Internet

Proportional Differentiated Services can be provisioned in terms of bandwidth, delay, or packet loss. Several studies contributed schedulers and packet droppers that achieved proportional bandwidth, delay, or loss differentiation. However, all these schemes differentiated in terms of only one of the three metrics. A simple, unified, scalable, and robust scheme to simultaneously control all three metrics was felt important. By controlling just delay and packet loss, proportional differentiation can be achieved in terms of all three metrics. A robust adaptive scheduler for proportional delay differentiation services is presented. Proportional services are further policed by a class based packet dropper. The combination of the adaptive scheduler and the packet dropper treats different traffic classes proportionally in terms of all three metrics. Simulation experiments show that regardless of the network traffic characteristics, our scheme can effectively differentiate services in terms of bandwidth, delay, and loss simultaneously