IPv6 End-to-End QoS Provision in Heterogeneous Networks Using Flow Label

The next generation Internet Protocol, IPv6, has attracted growing attention and has been deploying worldwide, especially in Europe, Asia, and North America. It intends to provide better QoS (quality of service) ability for the increasing demanding multimedia service, and FL (flowlabel) field in IPv6 main header was designed to be a big help in alleviating QoS problem. However, the related research work is still far from enough to make it practical. In this paper, we firstly investigate FL based cross domain QoS management in heterogeneous networks. The main contribution of this paper is threefold: First, we attempt to provide an analysis of FL-related definitions, and subsequently propose a modified IPv6 FL specification, which from the view of the authors can provide an efficient QoS. Second, we propose a novel FL-based inter-domain QoS solution, together with the detailed mechanism for FL generation, deletion and maintenance. Third, we extend SIP protocol for FL negotiation process. Experiment results show that our FL-based QoS model has better performance than existing ones.