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

The Internet is rapidly evolving into a commercial infrastructure, resulting in an increasing demand for QoS guarantee from the network. The IPv6 FL (flow label) is a function that, as it was designed, can be a big help in alleviating QoS problem in the next generation Internet. However, the related research work is still far from enough to make it practical. In this paper, we firstly investigate FL as a network layer QoS mechanism to provide a uniform platform cross multiple domains in heterogeneous network. 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. Second, we propose FL-AG (aggregated) QoS model for end-to-end QoS provision in heterogeneous networks. FL-AG model has excellent scalability and flexibility and is suitable for large-scale networks. Finally, detailed mechanism for FL generation, deletion and maintenance for FL-AG is proposed. Only in this way can FL be implemented in reality. Experiment results show that our FL-AG QoS model has better performance than existing ones.