Experiments with equivalent differentiated services in a grid context

Grids generally rely on a complex interconnection of Internet Protocol (IP) domains that offer heterogeneous services and unpredictable performance characteristics, particularly at the local area network/wide area network boundary. The total lack of end-to-end resource control in IP networks is responsible for performance problems that may affect the whole Grid environment. An end-to-end service differentiation architecture that controls heterogeneous communication performance is thus needed. We propose the Equivalent Differentiated Services (EDS) architecture, based on a layer-4 service differentiation solution exploiting a new layer-3 relative DiffServ model. In this paper, we present the EDS packet forwarding principles, the router mechanisms and two adaptive packet marking algorithms. As a proof of concept, we have implemented the EDS architecture in Linux and performed experiments on a transoceanic testbed.