2009 IEEE Symposium on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ISIEA 2009), October 4-6, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Video Quality of Service in DiffServ-Aware

Multiprotocol Label Switching Network


*J. Jaffar, **H. Hashim, **H. Zainol Abidin, **M.K. Hamzah
*Universiti Kuala Lumpur, 1016, Jalan Sultan Ismail, 50250 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
**Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA, 40450 Shah Alam, Malaysia
ibahhashim@gmail.com



Abstract The current trend set by service providers of
enhancing the degree of provisions in IP networks while
maintaining the optimum quality, has promoted many
research activities. These activities include those which aim
to introduce improved quality of services for popular
Internet services and applications. In this paper, quality of
services (QoS) of video transmission on Differentiated
Services (DiffServ) with multiprotocol label switching
(MPLS) network is being simulated and evaluated by a
network Simulator, OPNET. The need of integration of
MPLS with DiffServ particularly for the video traffic has
been demonstrated in the simulation. The objective of this
work is to study the influence of the QoS mechanism via
DiffServ-MPLS on network parameters such as packet loss,
delay and throughput for different video resolutions. The
comprehensive study showed general improvement in the
throughput and packet loss particularly of video
transmission when using DiffServ-aware MPLS network as
compared to when only MPLS or DiffServ is employed.
KeywordsVideo; QoS
I. INTRODUCTION
Various multimedia applications such as video
streaming, VOIP and video conference are gaining
demand bringing with it a massive congestion to the IP
networks. With the emergences of multimedia
applications in IP networks, bandwidth consumption has
become a critical issue among the Internet community and
Internet providers alike. Since bandwidth is a scarce and
precious resource in the Internet, various studies of QoS
mechanism had been done to satisfy the QoS of the
multimedia applications to the end user. The fundamental
objective of any QoS mechanism is to ensure that
excessive congestion does not occur for the packets with
assured QoS. QoS does not create capacity, but only
support prioritization of traffic and allocation of capacity
under congested conditions, or reduced the source rates to
decrease congestion [2]. Therefore, the fact that the
transmission of multimedia traffic needs a stable network
bandwidth due to its sensitivity to packet delay, jitter and
packet loss, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
had introduced several QoS mechanism, including
Differentiated Services (DiffServ) in order to provide the
necessary QoS [1].
DiffServ is capable of providing a stateless network
which is scalable and robust. The Differentiated Services
architecture is designed to provide differing level of QoS
to different traffic flows [2]. Following the DiffServ
advantages, service providers have benefited the latter to
roll out revenues by defining DiffServ architecture into
their network. By assigning applications to different
classes of service according to the Service Level
Agreements (SLAs), guaranteed quality of services can be
met. However, DiffServ alone is not enough to guarantees
SLAs. Hence, IETF had implemented MPLS architectures
which use labels to forward the packets into the
appropriate path. The combine use of the Differentiated
Services (DiffServ) and Multiprotocol Label Switching
(MPLS) technologies is envisioned to provide guaranteed
quality of service (QoS) [2].
In general, the bottleneck of transmission is in routers.
In conventional routing, each packet is forwarded hop by
hop using routing table based on algorithm in each router.
Each packet is forwarded independently in every router.
This approach is unreasonable and inefficient for
multimedia traffic [3]. Therefore, MPLS architectures
were introduced to utilize labels to forward the packets. In
many implementations, DiffServ is implemented
embedded with MPLS due to MPLS capability to support
DiffServ architecture (Metering, marking, policing,
queuing and scheduling). MPLS is being used as a
forwarding scheme while DiffServ as a QoS mechanism.
In the coming sections, MPLS and DiffServ
architectures and its operational behavior will be briefly
discussed and followed by a discussion on the
interoperability of these two architectures in order to meet
the quality of service (QoS) requirements.
In this paper, the QoS performance evaluation will be
conducted by sending an increasing streaming video onto
DiffServ-aware MPLS network by utilizing the OPNET
network modeler. In the simulation section, the
procedures of the experiment will be explained and the
results obtained will be further evaluated and discussed in
the results section. QoS performance parameters involved
in this experiment are the throughput, delay and packet
loss.
II. MULTIPROTOCOL LABEL SWITCHING (MPLS)
OVERVIEW
Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) protocol was
proposed by IETF in 1997. MPLS was introduced to
improve the scalability of network-layer routing, provide
routing flexibility, increase network performance, and
simplify the integration of equipment using non-IP
forwarding paradigms. MPLS is a packet-forwarding
technology which uses labels to make data forwarding
decisions. Routers that support the MPLS protocol suite
978-1-4244-4683-4/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE 963
2009 IEEE Symposium on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ISIEA 2009), October 4-6, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
are known as Label Switching Routers (LSRs). LSRs
make forwarding decisions based on a label added at the
shim header between link-layer and network-layer
headers. Since MPLS operates between layer 2 and layer
3, routing process will be much faster.
An MPLS label has 32 bits divided among the label
value (20 bits), a Time To Live (TTL; eight bits), a CoS
(three bits), and a Bottom of Stack (BoS; one bit). The
LSR uses the label value to make forwarding decisions;
the ingress LSR sets the TTL, a counter that is
decremented by each LSR along the path. If the TTL
expires, the LSR discards the packet. Finally, the CoS
field indicates class of service or drop precedence.
Label Edge Router (LER) is an edge LSR that makes
the boundary of the MPLS domain. Ingress LER will
perform a PUSH operation which tags a packet with an
MPLS label and enters the MPLS network; an egress LER
will then do the POP operation that removes the MPLS
label from a packet as it leaves the MPLS network.
SWAP operation is performed by the LSRs in the MPLS
domain to swap the labels according to the destined path
which is called Label Switch Path (LSP).
In MPLS, IP packets can be assigned to a different
Forward Equivalent Class (FEC). In FEC, IP packets can
be classified according to the packets priority which will
determine how the packets are handled within the
network. Thus all packets which belong to the same FEC
get treated in the same way and get quickly routed along
their path. Figure 1 show how an IP packet goes into an
MPLS network while MPLS tag switching is done on
each end of LER and LSR for non-edge MPLS router.
Therefore, instead of using the conventional Internet
packet forwarding scheme, where complicated address
matching is performed at each hop in the network, MPLS
forwarding has made the process far easier and faster.

Figure 1: MPLS Domain
III. DIFFSERV OVERVIEW
Differentiated Services or DiffServ is a routing
specification standardized by the IETF that specifies a
more scalable solution for classifying, managing network
traffic and providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees
on modern IP networks. Differentiated Services allow
packets that require higher QoS to be classified as higher
priority than other traffics. For example, video streaming
can receive higher QoS than other data traffic such as Http
by using DiffServ.
The differentiated services architecture is based on a
simple model where traffic entering a network is classified
and possibly conditioned at the boundaries of the network,
and assigned to different behavior aggregates. Each
behavior aggregate is identified by a single DS code point.
Within the core of the network, packets are forwarded
according to the per-hop-behavior (PHB) associated with
the DS code point [5].
DiffServ aggregates traffic into different classes by
marking IP packets, which will receive specific Per-Hop-
Behavior (PHB) at every node. The DiffServ Code Point
(DSCP) in the Differentiated Services (DS) field of the IP
header identifies the Per Hop Behavior (PHB) associated
with the packet, which is used to specify queuing,
scheduling, and drop precedence [5].
In a DiffServ environment, there are two defined per
hop behaviors (PHB): expedited forwarding (EF), and
assured forwarding (AF). EF PHB supports low loss, low
delay, and low jitter. AF PHB defines four relative classes
of service with each class supporting three levels of drop
precedence.
IV. SIMULATION MODEL
All the simulations in the paper are performed on a
Network Simulator, OPNET. Figure 1 show the network
topology used in this experimental study. The scenarios
used are based on fixed bandwidth which divides the
bandwidth along the classes as follows:
75 % for Video Traffic (EF)
15% for FTP Traffic (AF21)
10% for Http Traffic (AF11)
Using fixed bandwidth allocation facilitates identifying
the influence of Diffserv-MPLS architecture on video
quality of service. The core links were configured as E1
links (2.048 Mbps) while the links between the
clients/server to the edge routers were 10Mbps. The E1
links should provide ample bandwidth for three
simultaneous 512Kbit/sec video conferencing sessions,
depending on the amount of other traffic on the network.
The routing protocol was OSPF; therefore the best effort
path would be from Router A-D-E and hence would
constitute the bottleneck. There are four different
scenarios being tested which are 1) Baseline Best effort
topology, 2) DiffServ topology, 3) MPLS topology and 4)
Integration of MPLS and DiffServ (DiffServ-MPLS).
TABLE I
VIDEO TRAFFIC DEFINITION
Video Traffic
Frame Interval
(frames/sec)
Frame Size
(pixels)
Low Resolution 10 128x120
High Resolution 15 128x240

These scenarios were tested by increasing the video
traffic model as in Table 1 to observe and compare the
efficiency of these QoS architecture in addressing IP
packet loss, video throughput and video end-to-end delay
besides observing the FTP and Http traffic flows in the
network simulation. The FTP and Http traffic are obtained
from OPNETs standard application traffic model for
nodes which can be defined as heavy or light. In this case,
FTP traffic was set to high load and best effort type of
service, where files are 50000 bytes and time between
client request is exponentially distributed with mean 360
seconds. For Http traffic, heavy browsing was selected
964
2009 IEEE Symposium on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ISIEA 2009), October 4-6, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
where, page inter-arrival times are exponentially
distributed with mean 60 seconds, and each page has 1000
bytes of text and 5 medium images.
In the simulation, three classes of service are provided:
Expedited Forwarded (EF), Assured Forwarded namely
AF11 and AF21. The EF traffic has an optimum
bandwidth guarantee with low latency, low jitter and no
packet loss. Video traffic was defined as the EF service in
the simulation. However, due to the nature of the video
traffic having some burst period, with the guaranteed
bandwidth, there is still some packet loss happened [2]. In
the simulation, 75% of the link bandwidth was guaranteed
for EF traffic. AF class should have a minimum
bandwidth guarantee with low packet loss. AF21 was
defined for FTP traffic while F11 was configured for Http
traffic. Here, Http traffic had received the least QoS
guarantees.
In the simulation, background traffic has been specified
at the core links. The primary purpose of the background
traffic is to model the effect of general traffic in the
network on selected traffic of interest. This effect
primarily [9] takes the form of delay, utilization and
throughput of the link which enables modeling the traffic
flow as in real network. In the simulations, the
background traffic was configured as 2Mbps loads in
order to create enough traffic to make the link congested.
Router A and Router E were the Ingress and Egress
routers, while Router B, Router C and Router D were the
LSR routers. For MPLS configuration, LSP1 took place at
Router A - Router D - Router E and LSP2 was Router A -
Router B - Router C - Router E.

Figure 2: Network Topology

AF11 and AF21 will be routed to LSP2 and class EF
will route to LSP1. Hence, these traffics will avoid the
bottleneck at the shortest link and offers better guaranteed
services to video traffic. Table 2 showed the configured
QoS parameters as to define the DiffServ contribution to
traffic QoS.
In DiffServ-MPLS protocol, EF class used priority
queuing while AF11 and AF21 used Weighted Fair
Queuing (WFQ) in each passing node. Policing using
Committed Access Rate (CAR) was used at the Ingress to
police the packets flow accordingly before going into the
MPLS/DiffServ domain. CAR is a policing algorithm that
enables the service provider to control the flow rate from
one link to another link that has different bit-rates
requirement.
Random Early Drop (RED) was used as the congestion
avoidance algorithm to randomly drop packets at each
node as incoming congestions are detected. Each QoS
attributes were configured at the interfaces of core routers.
The advantage of employing DiffServ-MPLS in the IP
network is the capability of the service provider to make
full use of Forward Equivalent Class (FEC) by DiffServ
traffic classification via PHB. FEC is [4] a group of IP
packets which are forwarded in the same manner (e.g.
over the same path, with the same forwarding treatment).
TABLE II
QOS PARAMETERS
Router DiffServ Only DiffServ-MPLS
A
IF8: Traffic inbound
policing (CAR) , WFQ,
RED
IF3: Traffic outbound
policing (CAR) , WFQ,
RED
IF8: Traffic inbound policing
(CAR), WFQ, RED
IF3: Traffic policing (CAR),
Priority Queuing, RED
B IF1: WFQ, RED IF1: WFQ, RED
C
IF1: WFQ, RED IF1: WFQ, RED
D IF1: WFQ, RED IF1: Priority Queuing, RED
E
IF7: WFQ, RED
IF3: WFQ, RED
IF7: WFQ, RED
IF3: Priority Queuing, RED
V. SIMULATION RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
The simulations had demonstrated pure IP network only
provide best effort services for FTP, Http and video traffic
flows. All the traffic used the shortest path (A-D-E) and
exceeded its bandwidth capacity, while the longer path
(A-B-C-E) was under-utilized. The throughput increased
at the links as the video traffic increased its traffic rate
from low resolution to high resolution. Packets get
dropped and delayed as buffers overflow because the
resources in the network cannot meet all traffic demand.
In DiffServ-MPLS, the network path is fully utilized since
video traffic followed the A-D-E path while FTP and Http
is routed using A-B-C-E path. The overall performance of
the network had proved that DiffServ-MPLS approach
had guaranteed a lower delay and higher throughputs than
other scenarios.
Figure 3: Low Resolution Video Throughput
A. Video Throughput
Figure 3 and Figure 4 display the video throughput of
the four scenarios. DiffServ-MPLS clearly improved the
video throughput by more than 40 percent compared to
using the conventional routing. DiffServ-MPLS also
offers the best video throughput as compared to MPLS
and DiffServ only which only gave 20 percent
improvement.
965
2009 IEEE Symposium on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ISIEA 2009), October 4-6, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Figure 4: High Resolution Video Throughput
B. Video End-to-End Delay
As shown in Figure 5 and Figure 6, DiffServ-MPLS
had shown the lowest end-to-end delay among these three
schemes.
In DiffServ-MPLS, the labeling of packets has provided
faster processing rate at the routers compared to the
conventional IP address matching in routers. It also serves
the network in terms of its PHB where prioritization was
offered to the video application.
Therefore, DiffServ-MPLS demonstrated the advantage
to utilize these two attributes in offering the lowest end-to-
end delay for video traffic even though at high traffic
flow.
Figure 5: Low Resolution End-to-End Delay


Figure 6: High Resolution End-to-end Delay
C. Other Traffic Throughput
Figure 7 and Figure 8 demonstrates how the Assured
Forwarded traffic is being affected in the network when
using the three QoS schemes. It is reminded that in
DiffServ network, FTP was given higher priority than
Http traffic. Since FTP was classified better QoS than
Http, it is observed that DiffServ-MPLS has served FTP
far better than other schemes.
This is because in DiffServ-MPLS, FTP and Http
shared the same network path while video was routed to
another and FTP was given better services than Http. On
the other hand, the use of MPLS seems to have benefitted
Http traffic more in terms of its throughput. In addition to
that, the average throughput of both FTP and Http traffic
can be seen to decrease as volume of traffic increases but
on the other hand video traffic rate continued to increase.
This is because FTP and Http traffic are TCP while video
is UDP. In general, TCP source undergoes congestion
control phase when congestion is detected in the network
and slows down the sending rate while UDP has no
congestion control.

Figure 7: FTP Throughput

Figure 8: Http Throughput
D. IP Packet Loss
Figure 7 and Figure 8 demonstrates how the Assured
Forwarded traffic is being affected in the network when
using the three QoS schemes. It is reminded that in
DiffServ network, FTP was given higher priority than
Http traffic. Since FTP was classified better QoS than
Http, it is observed that DiffServ-MPLS has served FTP
far better than other schemes.
TABLE III
PACKET DROPS
Resolution
Packet Drop (packets)
Baseline MPLS DiffServ DiffServ
MPLS
Low 5.7 4.38 5.18 4.79
High 8.56 6.88 8.32 8.35

In DiffServ-MPLS scenario, packet drops were higher
than in the MPLS scenario albeit lower than the baseline
966
2009 IEEE Symposium on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ISIEA 2009), October 4-6, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
scenario. This is because of the QoS behavior in DiffServ
towards FTP and Http traffic where as the buffer
overflows, the lowest class will be dropped first.
Therefore, increasing the video traffic and giving 75%
guaranteed bandwidth to it has its price on other traffic.
However, FTP and Http are using TCP protocol which
offers error correction that allows lost data to be re-sent
until all the packets are successfully transferred. Hence,
with this quality and allowing delay in their transmission,
some packet drops can be tolerated. Therefore, by
permitting a considerate amount of packet drops in
DiffServ-MPLS as compared to lower loss in MPLS
scenario, DiffServ-MPLS had benefitted the video traffic
in the overall performance in terms of delay and
throughput.
VI. CONCLUSION
The combined use of the MPLS DiffServ is envisioned
to provide end-to-end guaranteed quality of service (QoS)
for multi traffic in IP networks. In this preliminary
findings, although, video traffic was given the highest
priority in DiffServ and also being routed to other path
using MPLS, it still appears to experience some packet
drops since video traffic in nature is variable-bit-rate
(VBR) and so it will have burst period which may not be
able to be handled by the bandwidth available in this
topology. However, in this simulation, we have shown
that the DiffServ-aware MPLS architecture offers
advantages for improved QoS in particular for throughput
and delay. Its effect on jitter needs to be investigated for a
more comprehensive analysis on the system.
Nevertheless there is still a need to study on the QoS
mechanism such as traffic policing, queueing, scheduling
and congestion avoidance to achieve guaranteed QoS
across the IP network. For example, in congestion
avoidance, instead of using fixed bandwidth allocation,
this scenario can be simulated out using a measurement
based bandwidth allocation which will include signaling.
Signal is sent from end to end to observe the current
bandwidth utilization before allocating the sufficient
resources for the traffics. Thus, the bandwidth wastage
can be avoided and the accepted traffics will be increased,
as the bandwidth allocated which is not utilized by the
dedicated traffic can be used by other traffics. On top of
that, the work can be extended by simulating point to
multipoint that can represent the real network scenario.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Financial support from Ministry of Science,
Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) Malaysia
ScienceFund No: 02-01-01-SF0006 & 02-01-01-SF0167
is gratefully acknowledged for implementation of this
project. Financial assistance of Universiti Teknologi
MARA is also gratefully acknowledged.
REFERENCES
[1] K. Nichols, V. Jacobson, L. Zhang, A Two-bit Differentiated
Services Architecture for the Internet, RFC 2638, July 1999
[2] Dongli Zhang, Dan Ionescu: QoS Performance Analysis in
Deployment of DiffServ Aware MPLS Traffic Engineering.
Eighth ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering,
Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed
Computing, 2007. SNPD 2007, Page(s): 963-967
[3] Ilias Andrikopoulos and George Pavlou, Supporting
Differentiated Services in MPLS Networks, Seventh
International Workshop on Quality of Service, IWQoS '99, 1999
[4] E.Rosen et al., Multiprotocol Label Switching Architecture,
RFC 3031, January 2001
[5] S.Blake et al.,An architecture for Differentiated Services,
RFC2465, December 1998.
[6] MPLS Support of Differentiated Services, RFC 3270
[7] J.F.Chiu, Z.P.Huang, C.W.Lo,W.S.Hwang and C.K.Shieh,
"Supporting End-to End Qos in DiffServ/MPLS Networks," 10th
International Conference on Telecommunications, 2003. ICT
2003. Pages(s): 261-266, 2003
[8] X. Zhu, M. Chen and Y. YU Video Transmission Based on
Diffserv Over IP Network, Communication Technology
Proceedings, ICCT 2003. International Conference on Vol. 2, pp.
1754- 1757, April 2003
[9] Linawati, I Made Suartika, Self-Similar Traffic Generator,
Teknologi Elektro. Vol.4 No. 1 Januari Jun, 2005
[10] Mitko Gospodinov, The effects of different queuing disciplines
over FTP, Video and VoIP Performance, Proceedings of the 5th
International Conference on Computer systems and Technologies,
2004
[11] Afef Kotti, Rached Hamza, Kamel Bouleimen, New Bandwidth
Management Framework for Supporting Differentiated Services in
MPLS Networks, International Conference on Communication
Software and Networks, 2009.
[12] Jasmina Barakovi, Himzo Bajri, Amir Husi, The Impact of
Increased Video Traffic on Quality of Service Parameters in Next
Generation IP/MPLS Network, 49th International Symposium
ELMAR-2007, 12-14 September 2007.

967