Abstract. Quality of Service defines a set of criteria used to classify the level of service allotted to a consumer or application.

These criteria include, but are not limited to, data rate, round trip delay, jitter and packet loss. Quality of Service is the ability to provide different priorities to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. For example, a required bit rate, delay, jitter, packet dropping probability and/or bit error rate may be guaranteed. QoS guarantees are important if the network capacity is insufficient, especially for real-time streaming multimedia applications such as voice over IP and IPTV, since these often require fixed bit rate and are delay sensitive and in networks where the capacity is a limited resource, for example in cellular data communication. Keywords: Quality of Service, Differentiated Service, Queuing discipline, Integrated Service, Traffic Shaping, Traffic Policing. 1. Introduction The ultimate goal of QoS is to provide adequate service levels [1] for certain heterogeneous applications without reducing the service experienced by other applications. Early work on QoS for the Internet used the "IntServ" [2] philosophy of reserving network resources. In this model, applications used the Resource reservation protocol (RSVP) to request and reserve resources through a network. While IntServ [3] mechanisms do work, it was realized that in a broadband network typical of a larger service provider, core routers would be required to accept, maintain, and tear down thousands or possibly tens of thousands of reservations. It was believed that this approach would not scale with the growth of the Internet. The second and currently accepted approach is "DiffServ" or differentiated services. In the DiffServ model, packets are marked according to the type of service they need. In response to these markings, routers and switches use various queuing strategies to tailor performance to requirements. (At the IP layer,

differentiated services code point (DSCP) markings use the 6 bits in the IP packet header. At the MAC layer, VLAN IEEE 802.1Q and IEEE 802.1D can be used to carry essentially the same information) Routers supporting DiffServ use multiple queues for packets awaiting transmission from bandwidth constrained (e.g., wide area) interfaces. Router vendors provide different capabilities for configuring this behavior, to include the number of queues supported, the relative priorities of queues, and bandwidth reserved for each queue. In practice, when a packet must be forwarded from an interface with queuing, packets requiring low jitter (e.g., VoIP or VTC) are given priority over packets in other queues. Typically, some bandwidth is allocated by default to network control packets (e.g., ICMP and routing protocols), while best effort traffic might simply be given whatever bandwidth is left over. + Corresponding author. E-mail address: (ajith.vyasarao@wipro.com,sheela.ganesh@wipro.com). 2009 International Symposium on Computing, Communication, and Control (ISCCC 2009) Proc .of CSIT vol.1 (2011) (2011) IACSIT Press, Singapore 80 In this paper we use Opnet (the leading network R&D) tool to examine both IntServ (RSVP) and DiffServ (PQ, CQ, FIFO, RED, and WRED) mechanisms and their impact on the network. QOS refers to traffic control mechanisms that seek to differentiate performance based on application or network operator requirements and also provide predictable or guaranteed performance to applications sessions. QoS is an issue because the default service in many packet switched networks is to give all applications

the same service and does not consider any service requirements to the network. This is also referred to as best-effort service. IP service is best effort service and it is different from probabilistic model. In case of probabilistic service there is a chance factor for success or failure. IP packets sometimes never reach the destination, the reason is that they take the best path from source to destination. IP packets are routed and routing is connectionless. Sometimes IP packets are discarded by the routers, hence they will not be able to reach the destination. IP packets are dropped by the router for some reason. Router cannot unscrupulously discard the packet. Router should state the valid reason for dropping the packet that is why it is known as best effort. It is very difficult to support QoS in a pure IP network; there is no single definition for the term QoS. QoS requirements are different for Audio and video application, QoS requirements are different for the interfaces and the network elements. Even at system level, QoS requirements are different and also vary from user to user. Perceptual parameters are translated to System QoS, for example picture detail is a perceptual parameter defined in terms of pixel resolution, picture color accuracy maps to color information per pixel, video rate maps to frame rate, video smoothness maps to frame rate jitter and audio quality depends up on sampling rate and quantization. 2. Components of QoS Framework QoS has to be implemented at various places in the network. IP network comprises of Nodes, Switches, Routers and Gateways. One has to implement packet classification and scheduling at the Router level, traffic conditioning at the network entrance, admission control at routers or somewhere in the network and there is a

need for signaling between host and the routers. Admission control is the first line of defense against attacks on QoS. Network should not commit any guarantee if available resources are not sufficient to support the request. Admission control functions must examine both traffic and QoS parameters carefully before accepting or rejecting a new request for QoS. 2.1. Traffic Policing Users violating the traffic policies can jeopardize the QoS of other connections, the network must protect well behaving users against such traffic violations. We can make sure that all entering traffic is subjected to policing. Policing functions are deployed at the edge of the network. If arriving traffic conforms to the traffic norms then it will be allowed inside the network and non-conforming traffic is dropped by the traffic policing entity. 2.2. Traffic Shaping Traffic shaping entity will not drop the non-conforming traffic instead it will be more interested in smoothening the traffic. Arriving traffic might be having undesirable characteristics but Traffic shaping entity will buffer the input traffic to smoothen it so that out going traffic will be having desirable characteristics. 2.3. QoS Management Goals of the QoS management are sharing the bandwidth requirements, fairness to competing flows, meeting bandwidth, packet loss, delay guarantees and reducing the delay variations. 3. QoS Architecture for the Internet