A differentiated services architecture for multimedia streaming in next generation Internet

This paper presents a Differentiated Services (Diffserv or DS) architecture for multimedia streaming applications. Specifically, we define two types of services in the context of Assured Forwarding (AF) per hop behavior (PHB) that are differentiated in terms of reliability of packet delivery: the High Reliable (HR) service and the Less Assured(LA) service. We propose a novel node mechanism called Selective Pushout with Random Early Detection (SPRED) that is capable of simultaneously achieving the following four objectives: (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 during congestion. We show that SPRED is a generalized buffer management algorithm 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. Simulation results demonstrate that under the same link speed and network topology, network nodes employing our Diffserv architecture have substantial performance improvement over the current Best Effort (BE) Internet architecture for multimedia streaming applications. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.