Following the success of the Internet, over the last five years or so IP has firmly established itself as the networking protocol of choice for a wide range of both traditional and emerging applications. More recently, among business users, there has been much interest in adding real-time applications, including voice over IP (VoIP) and interactive videoconferencing. A major driver for this is the desire to consolidate all applications on to a single, multi-service platform. This chapter focuses specifically on the DiffServ approach to QoS. DiffServ involves the segregation of traffic into a small number of classes, but unlike either the ATM QoS approach, or the IETF IntServ approach, there is no signalling control plane to look at end-to-end behaviour. Instead the approach relies upon per-class capacity planning at each router individually (the so-called per hop mechanism) in order to ensure that, overall, each class gets the standard of service required.

Inspec keywords: quality of service; protocols; telecommunication network routing; telecommunication traffic; IP networks; DiffServ networks

Other keywords: VoIP; telecommunication traffic; QoS; networking protocol; DiffServ approach; telecommunication router; per-class capacity planning; interactive videoconferencing; multiservice platform; IP networks; voice over IP

Subjects: Computer communications