This paper presents a Differentiated Services (Diffserv or DS) architecture
for multimedia streaming applications. Specifically, we define two types o
f services in the context of Assured Forwarding (AF) per hop behavior (PHB)
that are differentiated in terms of reliability of packet delivery: the Hi
gh Reliable (HR) service and the Less Assured(LA) service. We propose a nov
el node mechanism called Selective Pushout with Random Early Detection (SPR
ED) that is capable of simultaneously achieving the following four objectiv
es: (1) a core router does not maintain any state information for each flow
(i.e., core-stateless); (2) the packet sequence within each flow is not re
-ordered at a node; (3) packets from HR service are delivered more reliably
than packets from LA service at a node during congestion; and (4) packets
from TCP traffic are dropped randomly to avoid global synchronization durin
g congestion. We show that SPRED is a generalized buffer management algorit
hm of both tail-dropping and Random Early Detection (RED), and combines the
best features of pushout (PO), RED and RED with In/Out (RIO) mechanisms. S
imulation results demonstrate that under the same link speed and network to
pology, network nodes employing our Diffserv architecture have substantial
performance improvement over the current Best Effort (BE) Internet architec
ture for multimedia streaming applications. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V.
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