Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet Chapter 7 -- 6.7: Integrated Services

6.7: Integrated Services

In the previous sections, we identified both the principles and the mechanisms used to provide quality of service in the Internet. In this section, we consider how these ideas are exploited in a particular architecture for providing quality of service in the Internet--the so-called Intserv (Integrated Services) Internet architecture. Intserv is a framework developed within the IETF to provide individualized quality-of-service guarantees to individual application sessions. Two key features lie at the heart of Intserv architecture:

Reserved resources. A router is required to know what amounts of its resources (buffers, link bandwidth) are already reserved for ongoing sessions.
Call setup. A session requiring QoS guarantees must first be able to reserve sufficient resources at each network router on its source-to-destination path to ensure that its end-to-end QoS requirement is met. This call setup (also known as call admission) process requires the participation of each router on the path. Each router must determine the local resources required by the session, consider the amounts of its resources that are already committed to other ongoing sessions, and determine whether it has sufficient resources to satisfy the per-hop QoS requirement of the session at this router without violating local QoS guarantees made to an already-admitted session.

Figure 6.31 depicts the call setup process.

Figure 6.31: The call setup process

Let us now consider the steps involved in call admission in more detail:

Traffic characterization and specification of the desired QoS. In order for a router to determine whether or not its resources are sufficient to meet the QoS requirements of a session, that session must first declare its QoS requirement, as well as characterize the traffic that it will be sending into the network, and for which it requires a QoS guarantee. In the Intserv architecture, the so-called Rspec (R for reserved) defines the specific QoS being requested by a connection; the so-called Tspec (T for traffic) characterizes the traffic the sender will be sending into the network, or the receiver will be receiving from the network. The specific form of the Rspec and Tspec will vary, depending on the service requested, as discussed below. The Tspec and Rspec are defined in part in RFC 2210 and RFC 2215.
Signaling for call setup. A session's Tspec and Rspec must be carried to the routers at which resources will be reserved for the session. In the Internet, the RSVP protocol, which is discussed in detail in the next section, is currently the signaling protocol of choice. RFC 2210 describes the use of the RSVP resource reservation protocol with the Intserv architecture.
Per-element call admission. Once a router receives the Tspec and Rspec for a session requesting a QoS guarantee, it can determine whether or not it can admit the call. This call admission decision will depend on the traffic specification, the requested type of service, and the existing resource commitments already made by the router to ongoing sessions. Per-element call admission is shown in Figure 6.32.

Figure 6.32: Per-element call behavior

The Intserv architecture defines two major classes of service: guaranteed service and controlled-load service. We will see shortly that each provides a very different form of a quality of service guarantee.

6.7.1: Guaranteed Quality of Service

The guaranteed service specification, defined in RFC 2212, provides firm (mathematically provable) bounds on the queuing delays that a packet will experience in a router. While the details behind guaranteed service are rather complicated, the basic idea is really quite simple. To a first approximation, a source's traffic characterization is given by a leaky bucket (see Section 6.6) with parameters (r,b) and the requested service is characterized by a transmission rate, R, at which packets will be transmitted. In essence, a session requesting guaranteed service is requiring that the bits in its packet be guaranteed a forwarding rate of R bits/sec. Given that traffic is specified using a leaky bucket characterization, and a guaranteed rate of R is being requested, it is also possible to bound the maximum queuing delay at the router. Recall that with a leaky bucket traffic characterization, the amount of traffic (in bits) generated over any interval of length t is bounded by rt + b. Recall also from Section 6.6, that when a leaky bucket source is fed into a queue that guarantees that queued traffic will be serviced at least at a rate of R bits per second, the maximum queuing delay experienced by any packet will be bounded by b/R, as long as R is greater than r. The actual delay bound guaranteed under the guaranteed service definition is slightly more complicated, due to packetization effects (the simple b/R bound assumes that data is in the form of a fluid-like flow rather than discrete packets), the fact that the traffic arrival process is subject to the peak rate limitation of the input link (the simple b/R bound assumes that a burst of b bits can arrive in zero time), and possible additional variations in a packet's transmission time.

6.7.2: Controlled-Load Network Service

A session receiving controlled-load service will receive "a quality of service closely approximating the QoS that same flow would receive from an unloaded network element" [RFC 2211]. In other words, the session may assume that a "very high percentage" of its packets will successfully pass through the router without being dropped and will experience a queuing delay in the router that is close to zero. Interestingly, controlled load service makes no quantitative guarantees about performance--it does not specify what constitutes a "very high percentage" of packets nor what quality of service closely approximates that of an unloaded network element.

The controlled-load service targets real-time multimedia applications that have been developed for today's Internet. As we have seen, these applications perform quite well when the network is unloaded, but rapidly degrade in performance as the network becomes more loaded.