Evaluation of Incentive-compatible Differentiated Scheduling for Packet-switched Networks

Abstract

Communication applications have diverse network service requirements. For instance, <em>Voice over IP</em> (VoIP) demands short end-to-end delay, whereas <em>File Transfer Protocol</em> (FTP) benefits more from high throughput than short delay. However, the Internet delivers a uniform best-effort service. As a result, much research has been conducted to enhance the Internet to provide service differentiation. Most of the existing proposals require additional access-control mechanisms, such as admission control and pricing, which are complicated to implement and render these proposals not incrementally deployable. <em>Incentive-compatible Differentiated Scheduling</em> (ICDS) provides incentives for applications to choose a service class according to their burst characteristics without additional access-control mechanisms. <br /><br /> This thesis investigates the behaviour of ICDS with different types of traffic by analysis and extensive simulations. The results show some evidences that ICDS can achieve its design goal. In addition, this thesis revises the initial ICDS algorithm to provide fast convergence for TCP traffic.