High Performance QoS Routing

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Internet traffic has increased at an exponential rate over the past decade. Much of recent explosion in Internet data can be attributed to the phenomenal growth in the number of new users, the migration of corporate data to the Internet, and a surge in usage of multimedia as a content delivery medium. As a result, Internet traffic has doubled every few months and shows no signs of slowing down. Another development is the ever increasing demand for multimedia applications such as ReadAudio, Windows Media and others. These applications would benefit greatly if the underlying network infrastructure provided some form of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee. Attempting to keep pace with the bandwidth and other QoS requirements for multimedia applications, network equipment vendors and Internet service providers have continuously developed and deployed faster routers and higher speed links at the edges of backbone networks. Yet current demand for QoS guarantees within the routers still far exceed the supply. Recent development of Internet differentiated services (DiffServ) aims to provide services such as premium and assured services in addition to the existing best-effort service within routers in order to satisfy the demand for bandwidth and other QoS requirements. However several routing problems with respect to QoS guarantees are still open. The researchers will investigate the limitations of the current IP routers and their routing algorithms leading to the development of a high-performance QoS routing framework. The researchers will apply two major ideas: differentiated routing, deploying different types of routing protocols for different service classes in an integrated fashion, and parallel algorithms and structures within the routers to decrease the routing overhead. Hence, primary objectives of the proposed framework are to implement and theoretically support two innovative elements: (1) differentiated routing services and protocols to provide differentiation in routing decisions depending on QoS requirements, and (2) a QoS-aware router architecture with parallel computation on multiple general purpose processors to achieve cost effective, scalable and high-throughput routing. The first objective, exploration of differentiated routing, will allow the researchers to provide QoS-aware routing decision solutions within DiffServ networks. The second objective, investigation of parallel algorithms and structures within a QoS-aware router architecture, will allow the researchers to provide fast solutions, hence low per-packet routing overhead, to three major problems within DiffServ routers: routing table computation, packet forwarding and packet scheduling. To achieve these two objectives, the researchers will investigate concepts and theoretical framework for high-performance QoS routing, and verify concepts and theoretical framework via simulations and prototype implementation. What makes this research feasible and promising are recent developments in QoS-aware systems, parallel algorithms and end-to-end QoS routing algorithms. These components make it possible to support flexible and generic high-performance QoS routing framework, accessible to any distributed multimedia applications.