QoS Survey in IPv6 and Queuing Methods

Abstract: The routes in IP networks are determined by the IP destination address and the routing tables in each router on the path to the destination. Hence all the IP packets follow the same route until the route is changes due to congestion, link failure or topology updates. IPv4 tried using Type of Service (TOS) field in the IP header to classify traffic and that did not succeed as it was based on fair self-classification of applications in comparison to the network traffic of other applications. As multimedia applications were quite foreign at the initial IPv4 stage, TOS field was not used uniformly. As there are different existing Quality of Service (QoS) paradigms available, IPv6 QoS approach was designed to be more flexible. The IPv6 protocol thus has QoS-specific elements in Base header and Extension headers which can be used in different ways to enhance multimedia application performance. In this paper, we plan to survey these options and other QoS architectures and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. Some basic simulation for various queuing schemes is presented for comparison and a new queuing scheme prioritized WFQ with RR is proposed.