Improving fairness requirements for assured services in a differentiated services network

One of the more challenging research issues in the context of assured forwarding (AF) is the fair distribution of bandwidth among aggregates sharing the same AF class. Several studies have shown that the number of microflows in aggregates, the round trip time, the mean packet size and the TCP/UDP interaction are the key factors in the throughput obtained by the competing aggregates. Dynamic RIO (DRIO) is an interesting RIO technique suggested to improve assurances among heterogeneous flows in AF-based services. In this paper, we propose applying DRIO to aggregated traffic instead of the individual flows. Working at the aggregate level not only makes DRIO more appropriate to be used in AF networks, but also improves scalability substantially. In addition, we also mitigate some unfairness issues found in the original scheme. Several simulation experiments have been conducted to verify that the proposed improvements allow DRIO to fulfill fairness requirements more satisfactorily.