Leveraging the Rate-Delay Trade-Off for Service Differentiation in Multi-Provider Networks

The single best-effort service of the Internet struggles to accommodate divergent needs of different distributed applications. Numerous alternative network architectures have been proposed to offer diversified network services. These innovative solutions failed to gain wide deployment primarily due to economic and legacy issues rather than technical shortcomings. Our paper presents a new simple paradigm for network service differentiation that accounts explicitly for the multiplicity of Internet service providers and users as well as their economic interests in environments with partly deployed new services. Our key idea is to base the service differentiation on performance itself, rather than price. We design RD (Rate-Delay) network services that give a user an opportunity to choose between a higher transmission rate or low queuing delay at a congested network link. To support the two services, an RD router maintains two queues per output link and achieves the intended rate-delay differentiation through simple link scheduling and dynamic buffer sizing. We evaluate the performance, deployment, and security properties of the RD network services in various network topologies and traffic scenarios including delay-sensitive VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) applications.