| The ability to deliver Quality of Service (QoS) over an Internet protocol (IP) network has been a goal of researchers and vendors for a number of years resulting in advances in the areas of signaling, policy-based networking and traffic engineering to name a few. A current driving force in the IP QoS arena is the highly scalable Differentiated Services (DS).; This thesis uses OPNET Modeler to evaluate, through simulation, the ability to deliver guaranteed end-to-end QoS using IP through a DS domain. The DS architecture and specifically the components necessary to implement a DS capable router are examined. A number of dropping, scheduling and metering algorithms, most of which are described in published literature, have been evaluated and some modifications have been made in order to produce a proposed DS router. The proposed router has then been networked and simulations have been carried out to show that guaranteed end-to-end QoS is in fact possible for an IP based DS domain.; The thesis proposes an optimal router configuration to deliver both the Expedited Forwarding (EF) and Assured Forwarding (AF) per hop behaviours (PHBs). The results confirm that these PHBs can also be used to build desired per domain behaviours. |
