Dynamic DSCPs for heterogeneous QoS in DiffServ multicasting

The significant growths of group communications and QoS-aware applications over the Internet have accelerated the development of two key technologies, namely, multicasting and Differentiated Services (DiffServ). Although both are complementary technologies, their integration is a non-trivial task due to several architectural conflicts between them. The inherent heterogeneous nature of QoS multicasting further complicates this problem with the sender-driven nature of DiffServ. Thus, in this paper, we propose a method for providing heterogeneous QoS to multicast groups via dynamic DSCPs without per-group state information in the DiffServ core. We detail our approach as well as examine implications for an adaptive method for both multicast and unicast connections. Finally, we present simulation studies regarding the performance benefits of dynamic DSCPs in multicasting.