Quality of Service

Overview
Why QoS? When QoS? One model: Integrated services Contrast to Differentiated Services (more modern; more practical; not covered)

What is QoS?
Providing guarantees (or rough bounds) on various network properties:
Available bandwidth for flows Delay bounds Low jitter (variation in delay) Packet loss

Service provider QoS goals

Traffic classes for customers for differential pricing (Gold, Silver, )
Gets particular Service Level Agreement (SLC) about b/w, delay, etc. Costs more.

SLAs that specify rate guarantees, max rates, priorities, etc. Control who gets to use the network (admission control) (maybe, maybe not)

Why a New Service Model?

What is the basic objective of network design?
Maximize total bandwidth? Minimize latency? Shenker argues: Maximize user satisfaction the total utility given to users

What does utility vs. bandwidth look like?

Must be non-decreasing function Shape depends on application

Today: Elastic apps

Internet currently (mostly) provides one single class of best-effort service
No assurances about delivery

Most existing applications are elastic

Tolerate delays and losses Can adapt to congestion

Some real-time applications are inelastic

Inelastic Applications
Continuous media applications
Lower and upper limit on acceptable performance. BW below which video and audio are not intelligible Internet telephones, teleconferencing with high delay (200 - 300ms) impair human interaction

Hard real-time applications

Require hard limits on performance E.g. control applications

Claim: These apps are not as elastic or adaptive. Dont typically react to congestion. This is a bit questionable, but telephony has some of these attributes. Note about jitter: More jitter == more buffering == delay + memory.

Utility curve Elastic traffic

U
Elastic

Bandwidth

Does equal allocation of bandwidth maximize total utility?

Admission Control
If U(bandwidth) is concave elastic applications
U
Elastic

Incremental utility is decreasing with increasing bandwidth Is always advantageous to have more flows with lower bandwidth
No need of admission control;

BW

This is why the Internet works!

Utility Curves Inelastic traffic

U Delay-adaptive U Hard real-time

BW

BW

Does equal allocation of bandwidth maximize total utility?

Admission Control
If U is convex inelastic applications
U(number of flows) is no longer monotonically increasing Need admission control to maximize total utility U

Delay-adaptive

BW

Admission control deciding when the addition of new people would result in reduction of utility
Basically avoids overload

So?
Right answer depends on a lot of factors:
Cost of complexity vs. cost of bandwidth Can applications become adaptive?

Well worth thinking about!

Even if the answer is best effort is mostly okay

Important features:
Maximizing V doesnt necessarily maximize Ui
In fact, it almost cant! It takes away from elastic Us to add to inelastic Us

Keep in mind: Only so much you can do if underprovisioned

Much depends on the cost of adding b/w vs. the user benefit
Should you add capacity to support traffic? (VoIP? BitTorrent?)

Internet economics are not directly passed on to customer

Makes some economic models of reservations hard

Components of Integrated Services

1. Type of commitment
What does the network promise?

2. Packet scheduling
How does the network meet promises?

3. Service interface
How does the application describe what it wants?

4. Establishing the guarantee

How is the promise communicated to/from the network How is admission of new applications controlled?

1. Type of commitment
What kind of promises/services should network offer? Depends on the characteristics of the applications that will use the network .

Playback Applications
Sample signal packetize transmit buffer playback
Fits most multimedia applications

Performance concern:
Jitter variation in end-to-end delay
Delay = fixed + variable = (propagation + packetization) + queuing

Solution:
Playback point delay introduced by buffer to hide network jitter

Characteristics of Playback Applications

In general lower delay is preferable. Doesnt matter when packet arrives as long as it is before playback point Network guarantees (e.g. bound on jitter) would make it easier to set playback point Applications can tolerate some loss

Application Variation
Rigid & adaptive applications
Rigid set fixed playback point Adaptive adapt playback point
Gamble that network conditions will be the same as in the past Are prepared to deal with errors in their estimate Will have an earlier playback point than rigid applications

Tolerant & intolerant applications

Tolerance to brief interruptions in service

4 combinations

Applications Variations
Really only two classes of applications
1) Intolerant and rigid 2) Tolerant and adaptive
Other combinations make little sense
3) Intolerant and adaptive
- Cannot adapt without interruption

4)

Tolerant and rigid - Missed opportunity to improve delay

So what service classes should the network offer?

Type of Commitments
Guaranteed service
For intolerant and rigid applications Fixed guarantee, network meets commitment as long as clients send at match traffic agreement

Predicted service
For tolerant and adaptive applications Two components
If conditions do not change, commit to current service If conditions change, take steps to deliver consistent performance (help apps minimize playback delay) Implicit assumption network does not change much over time

Datagram/best effort service

Components of Integrated Services

1. Type of commitment
What does the network promise?

2. Packet scheduling
How does the network meet promises?

3. Service interface
How does the application describe what it wants?

4. Establishing the guarantee

How is the promise communicated to/from the network How is admission of new applications controlled?

Scheduling for Guaranteed Traffic

Use token bucket filter to characterize traffic
Described by rate r and bucket depth b

Use WFQ at the routers Parekhs bound for worst case queuing delay = b/r

Token Bucket Filter

Tokens enter bucket at rate r

Operation:
If bucket fills, tokens are discarded Sending a packet of size P Bucket depth b: capacity of bucket uses P tokens If bucket has P tokens, packet sent at max rate, else must wait for tokens to accumulate

Token Bucket Operation

Tokens Tokens Tokens

Overflow

Packet
Enough tokens packet goes through, tokens removed

Packet
Not enough tokens wait for tokens to accumulate

Token Bucket Characteristics

On the long run, rate is limited to r On the short run, a burst of size b can be sent Amount of traffic entering at interval T is bounded by:
Traffic = b + r*T

Information useful to admission algorithm

Token Bucket Specs

BW 2 1 1

Flow B
Flow A: r = 1 MBps, B=1 byte

Flow A 2 3

Flow B: r = 1 MBps, B=1MB

Time

Possible Token Bucket Uses

Shaping, policing, marking
Delay pkts from entering net (shaping) Drop pkts that arrive without tokens (policing) Let all pkts pass through, mark ones without tokens
Network drops pkts without tokens in time of congestion

Guarantee Proven by Parekh

Given:
Flow i shaped with token bucket and leaky bucket rate control (depth b and rate r) Network nodes do WFQ

Cumulative queuing delay Di suffered by flow i has upper bound

Di < b/r, (where r may be much larger than average rate) Assumes that r < link speed at any router All sources limiting themselves to r will result in no network queuing

Predicted Service
Goals: Isolation
Isolates well-behaved from misbehaving sources

Sharing
Mixing of different sources in a way beneficial to all

Mechanisms: WFQ
Great isolation but no sharing

FIFO
Great sharing but no isolation

Principle: Mixing with FIFO shares jitter better than WFQ Reality: Complexity

Predicted Service
FIFO jitter increases with the number of hops
Use opportunity for sharing across hops

FIFO+
At each hop: measure average delay for class at that router For each packet: compute difference of average delay and delay of that packet in queue Add/subtract difference in packet header Packet inserted into queues expected arrival time instead of actual
More complex queue management!

Slightly decreases mean delay and significantly decreases jitter

Key Principles of QoS

Explicit vs. Implicit signaling
Explicit has proven very difficult, particularly w/unmetered pricing
Economic incentives are critical! ISPs must be able to profit from service differentiation, etc. Part of the reason IntServ didnt take off, but DiffServ has found some use.

Isolation
Fair queueing + token buckets => e2e delays

Jitter sharing
Benefits of stat mux. Helps reduce max jitter of one flow by slightly increasing jitter of all flows

Admission control
Utility functions