A scalable share differentiation architecture for elastic and real-time traffic

Today´s Internet lacks the mechanisms necessary for traffic isolation (to divide resources fairly) and differentiation (to allocate resources to users according to their willingness to pay). In this work, we present a new architecture for relative service differentiation, scalable share differentiation (SSD), which allocates network resources on a user basis and properly provides for both elastic and real-time traffic isolation and meaningful differentiation. SSD does not require the storage of any per-flow or per-user information at the core nodes and is inherently designed to work without admission control, making it easier to deploy and manage. In addition, we present a way to provide more fine-grained flow control to users without changing the concepts of SSD, which permits users to choose different priorities for their packets/flows. This allows the integration of a novel concept for improving the service quality given to user flows: user-based admission control. With user-based admission control, the network is unaware of admission control decisions, and the user himself can perform the tasks of accepting, rejecting and prioritizing flows