Translation of specification units between IP and ATM quality of service declarations

摘要

An integral part of any network quality of service (QoS) system are its QoS declarations. QoS declarations consist of service classes, parameters, and specification units. QoS declarations are a component of the QoS architecture, as such they are a source of heterogeneity stemming from the fac t that different QoS systems may be based on different QoS architectures and thus use different QoS declarations. A particular problem in that domain is the translation of specification units for QoS systems hat are based on different forwarding technologies with respect to variable vs fixed packet sizes, i.e. packet vs cell switching. This is a problem that can be dealt with generically such that its solution can be applied to several situations of technically heterogeneous QoS systems like an RSVP/IntServ―or DiffServ―over an ATM-based system. While straightforward translations have been proposed, we investigate how more efficient translations can be achieved by using a slight but effective modification of existing AAL framirg schemes as well as making use of statistical knowledge about packet size distributions.