Proportional QoS provision: a uniform and practical solution

The proportional service model is receiving a lot of attention a an attractive model for providing differentiated services on the Internet. In particular, this model is controllable, able to provide the "tuning knobs" for network operators to quantitatively differentiate the quality-of-service (QoS) of different classes, and lends itself naturally to simple pricing schemes. We focus on the issue of how to practically implement such a QoS differentiation scheme at high-speed routers using efficient buffer management and packet scheduling mechanisms. We first propose a uniform scheduler. Unlike previously proposed schedulers which can be used only for a single QoS metric, our scheduler is suitable for various QoS metrics. We then introduce a new packet dropping mechanism with an active counter resetting scheme that compare favorably with previous schemes. Finally, we develop an original and simple approach for the integration of absolute QoS constraints with the proportional differentiation paradigm.