Check out the new USENIX Web site.

USENIX Home . About USENIX . Events . membership . Publications . Students
NSDI '04 — Abstract

Pp. 71–84 of the Proceedings

OverQoS: An Overlay Based Architecture for Enhancing Internet QoS

Lakshminarayanan Subramanian and Ion Stoica, University of California, Berkeley; Hari Balakrishnan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Randy Katz, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

This paper describes the design, implementation, and experimental evaluation of OverQoS, an overlay-based architecture for enhancing the best-effort service of today's Internet. Using a Controlled loss virtual link (CLVL) abstraction to bound the loss rate observed by a traffic aggregate, OverQoS can provide a variety of services including: (a) smoothing packet losses; (b) prioritizing packets within an aggregate; (c) statistical loss and bandwidth guarantees.

We demonstrate the usefulness of OverQoS using two sample applications. First, RealServer can use OverQoS to improve the signal quality of multimedia streams by protecting more important packets at the expense of less important ones. Second, Counterstrike, a popular multi-player game, can use OverQoS to avoid frame drops and prevent end-hosts from getting disconnected in the presence of loss rates as high as 10%. Using a wide-area overlay testbed of 19 hosts, we show that: (a) OverQoS can simultaneously provide statistical loss guarantees of 0.1% coupled with statistcal bandwidth guarantees ranging from 100 Kbps to 2 Mbps across international links and broadband end-hosts; (b) OverQoS incurs a low bandwidth overhead (typically less than 5%) to achieve the target loss rate, and (c) the increase in the end-to-end delay is bounded by the round-trip-time along the overlay path.

  • View the full text of this paper in HTML and PDF.
    Click here if you have forgotten your password The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2004 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 17 March 2004 ch
Technical Program
NSDI '04 Home
USENIX home