Quality of services for remote control in High Energy Physics experiments:a case study

The development of new advanced applications and the evolution in networkin g are two related processes which greatly benefit from two-way exchanges an d from progress in both fields. In this study we show how mission-oriented networked applications can be effectively deployed for research purposes if coupled to the support of Quality of Service (QoS) in IP networks. QoS is one of the latest research topics in network engineering. In this article we focus on two specific examples of networked applications : remote instrumentation control and remote display of analysis data when a pplied for the support of experiments in the high energy physics field. In this paper we focus on the application requirements: the availability of a reliable transmission channel, limited one-way delay for timely interaction s between servers and clients and fairness in network resources allocation in case of contention. The above-mentioned requirements can be addressed through the support of Qo S, i.e. through the differential treatment of packets on the end-to-end dat a path. Several technologies and protocols for QoS support in packet networks have been devised during the last years by the research community. In this study we focus on the Differentiated Services (diffserv) approach, an architectu re characterized by high scalability, flexibility and interoperability. In this paper we identify the application requirements and we quantitativel y specify the corresponding service profiles. The diffserv network architec ture needed to support the services is defined in terms of functional block s (policing, classification, marking and scheduling) and of their placement in the network. Finally, for each of them the configuration best suited to remote control s upport is defined. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.