Load-balanced differentiated services support switch

How to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees in the routing and switching devices has become one of the key research topics in the areas of routing and switching technologies. Differentiated services architecture (DiffServ), which forwards packets based on their per-hop behaviours, is known as a promising way for supporting QoS in a high-speed backbone network scenario. Motivated by the load-balanced Birkhoff-von Neumann switch, which has received much attention recently because of its outstanding extensibility performance, in this study, the authors propose a new switch architecture called load-balanced DiffServ support switch (LBDS). LBDS consists of pipeline traffic bandwidth control, priority-based load balancing, and bandwidth-based priority scheduling to implement fast forwarding for expedited forwarding (EF) traffic and assured forwarding for AF classes of traffic. The authors evaluate LBDS by extensive theoretical analysis and comprehensive simulations. As expected, LBDS can provide bandwidth guarantees for both EF and AF traffic. We also show that under burst traffic arrivals, especially when the traffic arrival pattern is non-uniform and the load is above 0.6, LBDS performs much better delay performance than existing DiffServ support schemes.