Providing service differentiation in pure IP-based networks

The lack of an effective cooperation between the data, control and management plane of QoS routing solutions presented so far, prevents the implementation of service differentiation in the context of pure IP-based networks. Most of paths calculation proposals performed by the control plane are unaware of service characteristics of each flow. Scalable data plane QoS proposals ignore the issue about selecting the best paths to route the traffic. Proposed management plane schemes do not perform the network state maintenance and service level monitoring. Multi-service routing is a flow-based forwarding protocol that implements the service differentiation in pure IP-based networks, using a straight cooperation between data, control and management plane. This cooperation is accomplished by a data plane supporting the DiffServ model and performs route selection based on flows service class, which is exploited by the management plane to carry out the network state maintenance, and performance monitoring by using the RTCP protocol, to provide service metrics to control plane for route calculation. Simulation experiments show better performance results achieved by Multi-service routing compared to those obtained by traditional link state protocol with the DiffServ model and QoS routing in heavy loaded network scenarios of mixed traffic having different service requirements.