A Service Differentiation Scheme for the End-System

Abstract

A number of research studies show that the operating system has a substantial influence on communication delay in distributed environments. Thus, in order to provide applications with end-to-end QoS guarantees, network resource management alone is not sufficient. To date, several approaches have been proposed, addressing QoS issues from the end-system point of view. However, while network QoS provisioning has achieved a good level of standardization, no standard proposals exist for the end-systems. We claim that a single architectural model, taking into account both end-system and network resource management is needed. In this paper we propose a QoS architecture, which extends the concept of service differentiation inside the end-system. A system prototype has been developed and tested on a Diffserv network scenario. The prototype incorporates a priority-based communication mechanism inside the end-point operating system and a local marker so to implement an appropriate mapping between local classes of services and network QoS levels. Experimental results have also been provided in order to evaluate the impact of the proposed architecture on Diffserv routers.

This work has been performed with the support of the Italian Ministry of Research and University (MURST) under a grant Progetti Cluster “Cluster 16 Multimedialita: LABNET2” and under a grant PRIN “MUSIQUE”.