Providing enhanced differentiated services for real-time traffic in the Internet

The Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture offers a scalable alternative to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for performance-sensitive applications in the Internet. Within the Diffserv framework, efficient traffic scheduling mechanism is a key component to ensure such QoS guarantees. In this paper, scheduling algorithm called Enhanced Weighted Fair Queueing (EWFQ) is proposed that enables fair bandwidth sharing while supporting tight bounds on end-to-end delay for real-time traffic such as voice over IP (VoIP) in DiffServ networks. EWFQ allows to create service classes and assign proportional weights to such classes efficiently according to their resource requirements. The results from the simulation studies show that the mechanism is able to ensure both the required end-to-end delay bounds and bandwidth fairness based on the specified service weights. Besides, our scheme has lower implementation complexity, along with scalability to accommodate the growing traffic flows in the Internet backbone.