Managing Connection-level QoS through an Overlay Service Manager



P. Moghe
Network and Service Management Research Department
Bell Laboratories
101 Crawfords Corner Rd., Holmdel, NJ 07733 USA
Email: pmoghe_AT_bell-labs.com

I. Rubin
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)
Los Angeles, CA 90095 USA
Email: rubin_AT_ee.ucla.edu



Abstract
We illustrate the role of service management in managing the quality-of-service (QOS) of applications. An increasing diversity of applications is expected to be offered over ATM. Even if these applications use the same ``media'', their connection-level QOS measures are different depending on their connection-level resource requirements and on their implementation at the connection layer. To illustrate this, we consider two representative service classes. Simple applications refer to applications that involve fixed number of clients and point-to-point connections. Complex applications on the other hand have dynamic client-membership and require multipoint connections. These two service classes perceive different connection-level QOS measures. For instance, simple applications can get blocked - external blocking is a possible QOS measure. Complex applications can, in addition to external blocking, suffer from internal loss. The latter is defined as the probability that a client in an ongoing application aborts the application because a newer client cannot add to the application. Internal loss is a measure of how clients in a service (such as a conference) are bound to each other at the application layer. Thus, the QOS of complex applications is then expressed as a tuple of external blocking and internal loss probabilities. In this paper, we consider an end-to-end ATM platform and assume that the traditional ATM admission problem has been solved. The service manager resident within each ATM switch manages QOS by an ATM overlay - that is, it supplements the traditional ATM connection admission procedures. Its objective, from a fairness viewpoint, is to isolate the QOS of each service class from its implementation. We study a simple, threshold-based scheme where the service manager gives priority when admitting new complex applications. We compute exactly, through queueing analysis, the QOS measures of the two service classes as a function of the threshold. We propose an optimality criterion for the threshold whereby both service classes suffer equal degradation. An iterative algorithm uses this criterion to approximately design such thresholds in the entire network.

Keywords: service management; application QoS management; resource allocation; high-level QoS management; multipoint services; conferencing applications; collaborative applications; dynamic client-membership

JNSM: Vol. 4, No. 4, 1996 Managing Connection-level QoS through an Overlay Service Manager [Vol. 4, No. 4, 1996]



NOTE: only abstract of paper available on-line

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