Survey on router policies providing fairness and service differentiation favoring real-time data transfers in internet

Abstract

Internet has IP-based routing mechanism. Forwarding and delivering in Internet is not guaranteed, and it is only a best-effort service. Situations of congestion make Internet difficult for real-time data transfers. Real-time data which have deadlines on quality may suffer from severe problems on throughput and delay. The term ‘fairness’ can be used to indicate a scenario where all flows get QOS approximately proportional to the data rate they contribute to the Internet. This can be achieved by regulating the high bandwidth consuming flows. But the real-time data flows which contribute only small data rate at regular intervals need service differentiation for achieving the deadlines on various QOS parameters. In modern Internet, which has more real-time data transfers, overall fairness can be ensured only if it has mechanisms to differentiate and support real-time transfers. The additional treatment they receive can be justified by such flows’ lower resource consumption. This paper is an extensive survey on router policies to ensure fairness to data flows and service differentiation that favors real-time traffic.