Utilizing the Diversities and Invariants of the Internet to Support Multi-Services

In this paper, we first make the observation that it is possible for a network to well support multi-services by utilizing the diverse user requirements and the Internet traffic characteristics. Motivated by this observation, we propose a harmonious priority-based multi-services support scheme (HARP) to treat flows using different criteria based on their service requirements. HARP uses a Discrete Smallest Transmitted Flow first (DSTF) to assign dynamic priorities for Web and background flows based on the number of bytes transmitted, and a fixed priority assignment for real-time and streaming flows based on their delay requirements. HARP can harmonize the co-existence of different flows by providing low queueing delays for real-time and streaming flows, guaranteeing short response time for interactive Web flows, and offering comparable throughput for background flows as in the traditional best effort network. Furthermore, HARP increases the goodput of the network by significantly reducing the packet drop rate. To demonstrate the effectiveness of HARP, simulations are carried out using realistic Internet traffic sources such as Web traffic, real-time and streaming traffic, and traditional best effort traffic. Simulation results indicate that a simple, scalable, and easy-to-deploy scheme can be designed to support multi-services by utilizing the invariants of the Internet through HARP.