Stratified best -effort QoS provisioning in noncooperative networks

Providing quality of service (QoS) to a diverse user base with heterogeneous service requirements is crucial to the success of the next generation Internet. The stratified best-effort service (SBS) architecture is proposed for this purpose. The primary goal is to provide graded services with per-flow QoS using service classes in routers without per-flow state. In the context of Diffserv, SBS provides soft, quantitative service specifications using certain PHB groups. QoS is induced as the result of the interaction of selfish users sharing common network resources, or noncooperative self-provisioning. Pricing schemes are essential to this architecture. Users will act selfishly but higher price prevents all users from rushing into the best service. So between users and networks, the edge-routers will charge higher price for packets requiring better QoS. First, a model is presented for multi-class QoS provisioning. The theoretical analysis of noncooperative multi-class QoS provisioning games in the single switch case includes existence criteria for Nash equilibria and conditions under which they are Pareto and/or system optimal. Second, we present and study a specific network architecture for facilitating noncooperative QoS provisioning in many switch systems with emphasis on realizability. The noncooperative many switch QoS provisioning problem is reduced to a distributed control problem. We present simulation results which show that our architecture is able to provide stable, stratified services to traffic with diverse QoS requirements. Lastly, we study the ordering properties of QoS measures in multi-class QoS provisioning systems when generalized processor sharing (GPS)-based packet scheduling is employed in routers