Integrated QoS management: Cooperation of processor capacity reserves and traffic management

When multiple flows including continuous media streams are simultaneously sent from a computer, allocation and management of both processor capacity and network bandwidth need to be considered. We propose a framework of Quality of Service (QoS) management inside a sending host that controls execution of sending threads in consideration of utilization of processor capacity and network bandwidth. To distinguish from flows which require only best-effort service, we call a flow which requires a specific rate of service "reserved flow."" To guarantee QoS of such reserved flow both in processor- and network-intensive cases in a sending host, processor capacity reserve is allocated such that the rate of each reserved flow is attained and non-conforming data are policed before they are transmitted. Processor Capacity Manager and the network device driver exchange information in a cooperative manner to support the rate adaptive allocation of processor capacity reserve. In this paper, we describe design and implementation of our framework on RT-Mach. The results of performance evaluations demonstrate that our scheme performs well for full-duplex Ethernet.