Triple Play Service Simulation and Packet Scheduling Performance Evaluation

Triple play technology is nowadays considered as an indisputable trend. The differentiated service (DiffServ) architecture is preferred over "hard quality of service" (QoS) integrated service (IntServ) architecture. Moreover it applies perfectly to triple play, as it satisfies differing QoS requirements. In addition, latest developments in the area of video and audio encoding impose new challenges in content delivery systems. The combination of these three technologies is expected to raise additional QoS related issues. Problems such as full exploitation of available bandwidth and providing adequate QoS to subscribed users by meeting the requirements of all three supported services (video, voice and data) must be addressed. Within this context, the particular paper examines the performance of common packet scheduling techniques used in a DiffServ triple play architecture. The performance of priority queuing (PQ), weight fair queuing (WFQ) and weight fair low latency queuing (WFQ-LLQ) schemes is assessed, in order to find the most appropriate solution for the underlying network. The evaluation of the schedulers is based on simulations designed upon real triple play networks, while trace files are used for the simulation of video flows