The last decade has seen explosive growth in Internet use, with the number of hosts growing rapidly year on year. The Internet has been able to withstand this colossal growth due to advances in technology (particularly in the field of optical communications) and the strength, stability and adaptability of its underlying. However, recent years have seen the emergence and deployment of a diverse range of multimedia and real time applications. These applications place increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure and its ability to provide adequate resources to meet the specific requirements of multimedia applications. There is a case to be made for changing the best effort nature of the Internet to enable some users/applications to receive better quality of service than others (for a price). The research presented in this thesis has examined the case for quality of service and the methodologies and implementations available to provide quality of service. In particular the differentiated services approach is evaluated through computer based modelling and simulation. Congestion management within the Internet is intrinsically linked to quality of service since congestion is typically the cause of any service degradation (such as increased delay and packet loss) which compromises the operation of multimedia applications. This research has compared a number of traditional congestion control schemes and thoroughly evaluated this operation and performance of the random early detection congestion avoidance scheme. The sensitivity of the random early detection algorithm to the setting of its parameters has been demonstrated and a potentially damaging flaw has been identified within the adaptive random early detection algorithm. Further research has evaluated a new and innovative distributed admission control scheme. No further details of this admission control scheme can be made available in this summary since it is the subject of an ongoing British Telecom Laboratories patent application.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:637011 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Fricker, M. L. |
| Publisher | Swansea University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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