Quality of Service

24.1
• Content
– Quality
– Data Flow Characteristics
• Reliability
• Delay
• Bandwidth
• Jitter
– Techniques that can be used to improve the quality of service.
• FIFO Queue
• Priority Queue
• Weighted Queue
– Traffic Shaping
• Leaky Bucket
• Token Bucket
 QUALITY OF SERVICE
⚫ Quality of service (QoS) is an internetworking issue
that refers to a set of techniques and mechanisms
that guarantees the performance of the network to
deliver predictable service to an application
program.
Data Flow characteristics

To provide quality of service for an Internet application, we need

to know what is needed for the application.
The characteristics attributed to a flow are:
Reliability:
⚫ Characteristic that the flow needs in order to deliver the

packets safe and sound to the destination.

⚫ Lack of reliability means losing a packet or
acknowledgement, which causes retransmission.

Delay:
⚫ Source to destination delay is another characteristic.

⚫ Applications can tolerate delay in different degrees.

Bandwidth:
⚫ Different applications need different bandwidths.
Jitter:
⚫ It is the variation of delay for packets belonging to the same flow.
⚫ For example, if four packets depart at times 0, 1, 2, 3 and arrive at
20, 21, 22, 23, all have the same delay, 20 units of time.

⚫ On the other hand, if the above four packets arrive at 21, 23,
21,and 28, they will have different delays: 21, 22, 19, and 24.
⚫ For applications such as audio and video, the first case is
completely acceptable; the second case is not. For these
applications, it does not matter if the packets arrive with a short or
long delay as long as the delay is the same for all packets.

⚫ High jitter means the difference between delays is large; low jitter
means the variation is small.
Techniques that can be used to improve the
quality of service.

Scheduling

⚫ Packets from different flows arrive at a switch or router for processing.

⚫ It is at the router that a packet may be delayed, suffer from jitters ,be
lost or to be assigned the required bandwidth

⚫ A good scheduling technique treats the different flows in a fair and

appropriate manner.
⚫ FIFO queuing,

⚫ Priority queuing,

⚫ Weighted fair queuing.

FIFO queue

⚫ In first-in, first-out (FIFO) queuing, packets wait in a buffer (queue)

until the node (router or switch) is ready to process them.

⚫ If the average arrival rate is higher than the average processing rate,
the queue will fill up and new packets will be discarded.
Priority queuing
⚫ In priority queuing, packets are first assigned to a priority class.
⚫ Each priority class has its own queue.
⚫ The packets in the highest-priority queue are processed first.
⚫ Packets in the lowest-priority queue are processed last

⚫ A priority queue can provide better QoS than the FIFO queue because
higher priority traffic, such as multimedia, can reach the destination with
less delay.

⚫ However, there is a potential drawback. If there is a continuous flow in a

high-priority queue, the packets in the lower-priority queues will never
have a chance to be processed. This is a condition called starvation.
Weighted fair queuing
⚫ A better scheduling method is weighted fair queuing.

⚫ Packets are still assigned to different classes and admitted to different

queues.

⚫ The queues are weighted based on the priority of the queues; higher
priority means a higher weight.

⚫ The system processes packets in each queue in a round-robin fashion

with the number of packets selected from each queue based on the
corresponding weight.

⚫ For example, if the weights are 3, 2, and 1, three packets are

processed from the first queue, two from the second queue, and one
from the third queue.

⚫ If the system does not impose priority on the classes, all weights can
be equal. In this way, we have fair queuing with priority.
Traffic shaping
⚫ It is a mechanism to control the amount and the rate of the traffic sent
to the network.

⚫ Two techniques can shape traffic:

– Leaky bucket
– Token bucket.
Traffic Shaping or Policing: Leaky bucket
Leaky Bucket

⚫ If a bucket has a small hole at the bottom, the water leaks from the
bucket at a constant rate as long as there is water in the bucket.

⚫ The rate at which the water leaks does not depend on the rate at which
the water is input to the bucket unless the bucket is empty.

⚫ The input rate can vary, but the output rate remains constant.

⚫ Similarly, in networking, a technique called leaky bucket can smooth

out bursty traffic.

⚫ Bursty chunks are stored in the bucket and sent out at an average rate
Leaky bucket implementation
⚫ A FIFO queue holds the packets.
⚫ Traffic with fixed-size packets - the process removes a fixed

number of packets from the queue at each tick of the clock.

⚫ Traffic with variable-length packets - the fixed output rate

must be based on the number of bytes or bits.

⚫ An algorithm for variable-length packets:

1. Initialize a counter to n at the tick of the clock.
2. If n is greater than the size of the packet, send the packet and
decrement the counter by the packet size. Repeat this step until n is
smaller than the packet size.
3. Reset the counter and go to step 1.

⚫ A leaky bucket algorithm shapes bursty traffic into fixed-rate traffic by

averaging the data rate. It may drop the packets if the bucket is full.
 Drawback

⚫ The leaky bucket is very restrictive. It does not credit an idle host.

⚫ For example, if a host is not sending for a while, its bucket becomes
empty. Now if the host has bursty data, the leaky bucket allows only an
average rate. The time when the host was idle is not taken into account.

24.19
Token bucket
⚫ It allows idle hosts to accumulate credit for the future in the form of
tokens. For each tick of the clock, the system sends n tokens to the
bucket.

⚫ The system removes one token for every cell (or byte) of data sent.

⚫ Let the bucket capacity is 10,000 tokens and tokens are added at the
rate of 1000 tokens per second. If the system is idle for 10 seconds ,the
bucket collects 10,000 tokens and becomes full. Now the host can
consume all these tokens in one tick with 10,000 cells, or the host takes
1000 ticks with 10 cells per tick.

⚫ The host can send bursty data as long as the bucket is not empty.
⚫ The token bucket can easily be implemented with a counter.

⚫ The token is initialized to zero.

⚫ Each time a token is added, the counter is incremented by 1.

⚫ Each time a unit of data is sent, the counter is decremented by 1.

⚫ When the counter is zero, the host cannot send data.

⚫ The token bucket allows bursty traffic at a regulated maximum rate

Qns:
1)What is a network? What are its types?
2)With a suitable diagram, explain the basic communication model
3)Define the terms: protocol, protocol stack, n PDU, topology.
4)State the importance of protocol architecture.
5)Why protocol layering is made?
6)State the role of standard organization.
7)Explain OSI Reference Model.
8)Explain TCP/IP protocol suite.
9)Explain the history of Internet.
10)What are the characteristics of data flow?
11)Explain QoS in Internet.
12)What are the different security threats?