Skip to main content
Log in

Techniques for the Study of QoS in IP Networks

  • Published:
BT Technology Journal

Abstract

Setting the many parameters available to the operator in a QoS-enabled IP network in order to achieve peak performance is a highly non-trivial task. Individual settings are not independent; and their consequences depend upon the traffic and application mix, the behaviour of higher-level protocols, the remainder of the network, and the customer's response. To complicate matters further, settings which optimise mean achievable bandwidth for large files may be very different from those best for Web-browsing applications; and within a single class the preferred values to minimise mean or median delays may be different from those which minimise different percentiles. To study the behaviour of all these, a range of techniques needs to be employed. This paper gives examples of analytic, simulation and experimental approaches, and shows how they are all needed for an in-depth understanding.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Heinanen J, Baker F, Weiss W and Wroclawski J: ‘Assured forwarding PHB group’, draft-ietf-diffserv-af-01 (October 1998).

  2. Gibbens R J, Sargood S K, Kelly F P, Azmoodeh H, Macfadyen R N, and Macfadyen N W: ‘An approach to service level agreements for IP networks with differentiated services’, Royal Society Discussion Meeting on Network Modelling in the 21st Century, December 1999 – http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~richard/research/ topics/royalsoc1999/

  3. May M, Bolot J-C, Jean-Marie A and Diot C: ‘Simple performance models of differentiated services schemes for the Internet’, Proc of Infocom'99 (1999).

  4. Cao J, Cleveland W S, Lin D and Sun D X: ‘Internet traffic tends to Poisson and independent as the load increases’, Bell Labs (2001).

  5. Floyd S: ‘Recommendations on using the ‘gentle’ variant of RED’, (March 2000) – http://www.aciri.org/floyd/red/gentle.html

  6. Macfadyen N W: ‘Traffic characterisation and modelling’, BT Technol J, 20, No 3, pp 14–30 (July 2002).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Bonald T, May M and Bolot J-C: ‘Analytic evaluation of RED performance’, Proc of Infocom 2000, pp 1415–1424 (2000).

  8. Clark D D and Fang W: ‘Explicit allocation of best effort packet delivery service’, MIT Lab for Computer Science – http:// DiffServ.lcs.mit.edu/Papers/exp-alloc-ddc-wf.pdf

  9. Christiansen M, Jeffay K, Ott D and Donelson Smith F: ‘Tuning RED for Web traffic’, SIGCOMM2000 (2000) – http://www.cs.unc.edu/ ~jeffay/talks/SIGCOMM-00.pdf

  10. Claffy K et al: ‘The nature of the beast: recent traffic measurements from an Internet backbone’, INET98 (1998) – http://www.caida.org/ outreach/papers/Inet98/

  11. Stevens W R: ‘TCP/IP Illustrated: The Protocols’, Vol 1, Addison Wesley (1994).

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

About this article

Cite this article

Carter, S.F., Macfadyen, N.W., Martin, G.A.R. et al. Techniques for the Study of QoS in IP Networks. BT Technology Journal 20, 100–115 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020803911700

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020803911700

Keywords

Navigation