MEPFQ: Efficient and fair scheduling mechanism for real-time multimedia applications in differentiated services networks

One of the key issues in the next generation Internet is end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning for real-time applications. The Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture offers a scalable alternative to provide QoS in the Internet. However, within this architecture, an efficient scheduling mechanism is still needed to ensure such QoS guarantees. In this paper, scheduling mechanism for supporting QoS differentiation among multiple traffic classes in IP differentiated services networks is studied. A scheduling algorithm called Multiclass Efficient Packet Fair Queueing (MEPFQ) is proposed that enables fair bandwidth sharing while supporting better bounds on end-to-end network delay for QoS-sensitive applications such as voice over IP (VoIP) within the DiffServ framework. The mechanism allows to create service classes and assign proportional weights to such classes efficiently according to their resource requirements. Besides, MEPFQ tries to ensure that packets from low priority class will not be starved even under extreme congestion cases. The results from the simulation studies show that the mechanism is able to ensure both the required end-to-end network delay bounds and bandwidth fairness for QoS-sensitive applications based on the specified service weights under various traffic and network conditions. Another important aspect of the MEPFQ algorithm is that the scheme has lower implementation complexity, along with scalability to accommodate the growing traffic flows at the core routers of high-speed Internet backbone.