Active rate management in DiffServ

The inability of TCP aggregates, belonging to assured forwarding per-hop-behavior, to reach guaranteed rates remains an impediment to the successful deployment of DiffServ. Active rate management (ARM) Y. Chait et al., (2002) has been proposed to overcome this deficiency; basically it introduces a feedback structure around the classical token bucket marker. Its behavior in an over-provisioned network is of importance, as most networks will be over-provisioned due to admission control. Although guaranteed rates are achieved, in an over-provisioned network ARM adversely affects DiffServ functionality. We determine that this is primarily due to the inappropriate error measure used in its structure, and propose an alternative marker that resembles ARM but uses a different error measure and so enables retention of all DiffServ functionality as validated by simulations