OverQoS: End-to-end QoS without End-to-end Machinery

Hari Balakrishnan
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I'll describe the design of OverQoS and the algorithms it employs. OverQoS
provides a range of end-to-end QoS guarantees without requiring QoS mechanisms
in all IP routers on network paths, unlike all other QoS proposals. It is
therefore incrementally deployable and empowers both ISPs and third-party
providers to deploy and experiment with innovative QoS models in the Internet.
The key idea that enables this is a "controlled loss virtual link" (CLVL)
abstraction provided to the overlay traffic on the network path connecting two
OverQoS routers. The CLVL abstraction guarantees that the loss rate for the
overlay traffic on the corresponding network path will almost never exceed a
pre-specified target loss rate, regardless of the nature of other traffic
sharing portions of this path. I'll describe an algorithm to implement CLVL
using forward error correction, and show some results that indicate that
OverQoS might be a useful architecture for the future.


Joint work with I. Stoica and L. Subramanian


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