Class-of-service in ip backbones: informing the network neutrality debate

The benefit of Class-of-Service (CoS) is an important topic in the "Network Neutrality" debate. Proponents of network neutrality suggest that over-provisioning is a viable alternative to CoS. We quantify the extra capacity requirement for an over-provisioned classless (i.e., best-effort) network compared to a CoS network providing the same delay or loss performance for premium traffic. We first develop a link model that quantifies this Required Extra Capacity (REC). For bursty and realistic traffic distributions, we find the REC using ns-2 simulation comparisons of the CoS and classless link cases. We use these link models to quantify the REC for realistic network topologies. We show that REC can be significant even when the proportion of premium traffic is small, a situation often considered benign for the over-provisioning alternative. Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.4 [Computer Systems Organization]: Performance of Systems C.4 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Netw...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Murat Yuksel, Kadangode K. Ramakrishnan, Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, Joseph D. Houle, Rita Sadhvani
• Keywords: Extra Capacity, Hardware, Link Models, Network Neutrality, SIGMETRICS 2008