Identification of class of services in the Internet and a proposed approach to traffic prioritization at layer 3

The Differentiated Services architecture represents a highly scalable architecture for deployment of Quality of Services across the next-generation Internet. The Differentiated Services enable the packets that pass through network devices operating on layer 3 information, such as routers, to have their relative priority differentiated from one another. With Differentiated Services marking, Layer 3 devices can establish aggregated precedence-based queues and provide better service (when packet service is subject to queuing, as is the case under significant traffic loads) to packets that have higher relative priority. Though the Differentiated Services filled in the Internet Protocol header serves the purpose of identification of different kinds of traffic and aggregating traffic with similar Quality of Services requirements into classes, it may practically pose challenges when getting deployed on a large scale network. These challenges include: a) Differentiated services handling large amount of traffic focused on differentiating different kinds of traffic rather than analyzing who generated the traffic. b) Differentiated Service based switching is with the management of actual service response, which an end node receives. The primary purpose of this paper is to identify these shortcomings related to prioritization of traffic based on the Internet Protocol header´s Differentiated Services field at the routers in a large scale network and to propose a unique solution by using the MPLS and some rule sets to help overcome these shortcomings.