On traffic types and service classes in the Internet

Abstract

In today's Internet, various traffic types having different characteristics and requirements (e.g., voice, video, best effort) share the same resources. In order to provide services that an appropriate to each, both the IETF and IEEE 802 have proposed a support for traffic differentiation. In both cases, service classes corresponding to separate queues an identified, and packets an marked according to their class, which in turn defines the treatment they will get at each hop in the network. Using realistic models to represent each of the various traffic types, we identify those that can be mixed in the same queue without bearing a significant loss in throughput; correspondingly, we make recommendations on how to map different traffic types to the available service classes.