Title: Network QoS without the network 

  Manpreet Singh, Prashant Pradhan (IBM T.J. Watson Research) and Paul Francis

Abstract: Providing Quality of Service (QoS) in the Internet has been an area of research ever since the Internet came into existence. Various schemes like IntServ, DiffServ, RSVP, etc have been proposed in the past. But none of these have been deployed in practice, primarily because they require support from the network elements and ISPs. This thesis aims at providing end-to-end QoS guarantees in both overlay networks and the general Internet without requiring universal network support (which has become increasingly hard to achieve). 

We examine the use of aggregate TCP congestion management to provide differential service for a group of TCP flows that share the same bottleneck link. The key challenge is to be fair to other TCP flows in the network (and to other TCP aggregates) while holding the fair share of bandwidth entitled to the aggregate's TCP flows. In this thesis, we propose an aggregate congestion management scheme that adequately meets these requirements, and can therefore potentially be used as a building block for end-to-end Internet QoS. Experiments on the real Internet show that this can achieve an order of magnitude finer QoS granularity over the existing schemes.