Delivering end-to-end quality of service through an Internet protocol based differentiated services domain

The ability to deliver quality of service (QoS) over an IP network has been a goal of researchers and vendors for a number of years resulting in advances in the areas of signaling, policy-based networking and traffic engineering to name a few. A current driving force in the IP QoS arena is the highly scalable differentiated services (DS). This paper uses OPNET Modeler to evaluate, through simulation, the ability to deliver guaranteed end-to-end QoS using IP through a DS domain. The DS architecture and specifically the components necessary to implement a DS capable router are examined. There are many dropping, scheduling and metering algorithms described in published literature, some of which have been implemented by vendors. A number of these were evaluated and some modifications made in order to produce a proposed DS router. The proposed router was then networked and simulations run to show that guaranteed ETE QoS is in fact possible for an IP based DS domain