Predictive Loss Pattern Queue Management for Internet Routers

Widespread availability of real-time services is then ext challenge for the Internet after the introduction of the WWW has already changed Internet traffic patterns once. As the Internet provides a 'best effort' datagram service only, no assurance for actual packet delivery for real-time flows can be given. Most real-time applications exhibit tolerance against occasional loss of packets, but are sensitive to losses that occur in bursts. This is especially significant for a voice service, which we consider as our primary target application in this paper due to its importance in the future Internet, its relatively well-known subjective properties in the presence of packet loss an its simple flow structure. Currently all hop-by-hop approaches to enhance the QoS for real-time flows either use strict per-flow setup and state maintenance of reservations or rely on the sender/ingress router which is unaware of the amount and the location of congestion in the network to mark packets for preferred treatment. This results in either high resource consumption in the network or dissatisfactory perceived quality. For interactive voice, end-to-end adaptation to the current network load is also difficult to apply, considering the per-flow overhead and usual traffic properties.