Quality‐of‐Service Mechanisms for Flow‐Based Routers

In this paper, we propose quality of service mechanisms for flow‐based routers which have to handle several million flows at wire speed in high‐speed networks. Traffic management mechanisms are proposed for guaranteed traffic and non‐guaranteed traffic separately, and then the effective harmonization of the two mechanisms is introduced for real networks in which both traffic types are mixed together. A simple non‐work‐conserving fair queuing algorithm is proposed for guaranteed traffic, and an adaptive flow‐based random early drop algorithm is proposed for non‐guaranteed traffic. Based on that basic architecture, we propose a dynamic traffic identification method to dynamically prioritize traffic according to the traffic characteristics of applications. In a high‐speed router system, the dynamic traffic identification method could be a good alternative to deep packet inspection, which requires handling of the IP packet header and payload. Through numerical analysis, simulation, and a real system experiment, we demonstrate the performance of the proposed mechanisms.