A relative bandwidth differentiated service for TCP micro-flows

The Internet Differentiated Services concept has broadened the quality of service requirements which an application can subscribe to with the introduction of relative service differentiation. By limiting differentiation to a limited number of classes, one can rely on simple traffic meters, queue management and scheduling mechanisms. Possible differentiation measures are bandwidth, delay and drop probability. It is clear that requirements of an application can be based on each of these measures or on a combination. The paper describes a new service that combines loss and delay differentiation to provide throughput differentiation for TCP micro-flows. The basic idea behind this service uses advances in TCP performance characterization, showing that TCP throughput is a function of the incurred network delay and the experienced loss. We show that combined relative delay and loss differentiation leads to bandwidth differentiation for individual TCP micro-flows