| This dissertation presents Edge-to-edge Control (EC), a new traffic control and service differentiation architecture for communication networks. Unlike traditional QoS architectures which require complex scheduling at bottlenecks, EC requires only that intermediate nodes provide FIFO queuing and a separate class for EC traffic. Similar to DiffServ, EC concentrates functionality at internetwork edges where existing or proposed building blocks can be employed for traffic control, measurement, policing, congestion-sensitive admission control, congestion-sensitive pricing, and differentiated services. Unlike Diffserv, EC operates by establishing closed-loop regulated traffic trunks between EC edges. This traffic trunking building block is called an EC trunk. EC trunks use congestion avoidance to push congestion back from intermediate network nodes distributing the congestion across EC edges where the smaller congestion problems are handled with more stateful and sophisticated methods. EC places no new implementation or upgrade requirements at bottlenecks, requires no new packet format requirements at the IP-level, and requires no upgrades from end-systems. We also propose Riviera, a rate-based congestion avoidance algorithm that implements congestion avoidance for EC trunks. |
