Resource allocation for elastic traffic: architecture and mechanisms

For the last decade, QoS support for the Internet has focused on real-time applications such as audio and video. However, today´s Internet is dominated by elastic traffic flows (such as Web traffic) that are more tolerant of delay and jitter. Such traffic flows tend to be short-lived and the end-to-end reservation approach for resource allocation does not work well for them. Some form of flow aggregation is required to do resource allocation in a scalable manner. In this paper, we present user-share differentiation (USD), an architecture for providing long-term, scalable, resource allocation for elastic traffic. The USD scheme has the advantages of per-customer traffic isolation, flexible service models, and scalability. We also summarize simulation results (presented in Basu et al. (1998), in detail) that show the effectiveness of the USD scheme