Differentiated services versus over-provisioned best-effort for pure-IP mobile networks

One of the most critical issues for future pure-IP mobile/wireless networks is engineering QoS mechanisms in order to fulfil different user requirements. Time and throughput critical applications, like VoIP and Web, pose strict requirements in such pure-IP domains. Even though DiffServ resolves scalability issues of the stateful-based IntServ architecture, it projects scalability issues in the control plane, which is the bandwidth broker. The paper compares over-provisioned best-effort scenarios and differentiated service (DiffServ) capable schemes, in terms of the QoS achieved by different applications. The main objective is to reveal the degree of over-provisioning needed for best-effort scenarios to provide applications with the same QoS as a DiffServ enabled architecture.