Resource allocation for elastic traffic: architecture and mechanisms

For the last decade, QoS support for the Internet has focused on real-time applications such as audio and video. However, today's Internet is dominated by elastic traffic flows (such as Web traffic) that are more tolerant of delay and jitter. Such traffic flows tend to be short-lived and the end-to-end reservation approach for resource allocation does not work well for them. Some form of flow aggregation is required to do resource allocation in a scalable manner. In this paper, we present user-share differentiation (USD), an architecture for providing long-term, scalable, resource allocation for elastic traffic. The USD scheme has the advantages of per-customer traffic isolation, flexible service models, and scalability. We also summarize simulation results (presented in Basu et al. (1998), in detail) that show the effectiveness of the USD scheme