A network architecture for providing per‐flow delay guarantees with scalable core

Many real‐time applications demand delay guarantees from the network. A network architecture designed to support these applications should be robust and scalable. The IntServ architecture provides per‐flow QoS at the cost of robustness and scalability. The DiffServ architecture is robust and scalable but can provide QoS at a class level and not at a flow level.

In this paper, our aim is to design architectures that are scalable and robust like DiffServ and at the same time able to provide per‐flow QoS like IntServ. We propose a non work‐conserving and a work‐conserving architecture to achieve this goal. The guaranteeable delay regions of these architectures are the same as those of GPS based policies with rate proportional resource allocation. We also propose a scheme to provide meaningful throughput and responsiveness to best effort traffic even in the presence of heavy QoS load.