QoS provisioning using IPv6 flow label in the Internet

Today\´s Internet only provides "best-effort" service. Traffic is processed as quickly as possible, but with no commitment as to bandwidth or latency guarantee. This is inadequate for applications requiring timeliness such as video conference, video-on-demand (VOD) and voice over IP (VoIP), etc. For these applications to be widely used, Quality of Service (QoS) must be quantified and managed efficiently by the Internet. This paper focuses on QoS provisioning using IPv6 flow label field. In this paper, we first investigate the flow label specification and its usage in QoS support proposed in the literature, then propose an end-to-end QoS scheme using the IPv6 flow label field, which employs a hybrid approach for flow label specification and a " flow label option" for IPv4 packet. This proposed QoS scheme is especially designed for transitional IP network containing both IPv4 and IPv6 network nodes, which is the reality in the process of Internet transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Our simulation results show that the proposed QoS scheme can efficiently differentiate various types of traffic to meet differentiated QoS requirements in a transitional network containing IPv4 and IPv6 routers.