A QoS Improvement Scheme for Real-Time Traffic Using IPv6 Flow Labels

Abstract

The flow label field in IPv6 has been proposed to provide QoS. Since the existing flow label assignment scheme such as Random Number has utilized the flow label only as the identifier of flow it is not appropriate to providing differentiated services according to the characteristics of various types of real-time traffic. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose a Hybrid scheme that also utilizes the flow label field as a way to specify QoS parameters. To be specific, this paper investigates a scheme that both guarantees end-to-end QoS and utilizes efficiently backbone resources by allowing users to specify QoS parameters using the flow label. Assuming an MPLS-TE network as a IPv6 backbone, we compare the performance of our proposed scheme with that of Random Number scheme through simulation. Simulation results show that our scheme is more efficient than the existing one in terms of transmission throughput as well as resource utilization of the backbone.