Multicast Service Differentiation in Core-Stateless Networks

Diffserv has emerged as a popular architectural paradigm for providing service differentiation for future internetworks. The key principle of Diffserv is to move per-flow state out of the core and into the fringes of network clouds. Using core-stateless networks, techniques such as Core Stateless Fair Queueing (CSFQ) have been proposed for achieving unicast service differentiation in core routers. In this paper, we propose a core-stateless network architecture called mCorelite that extends CSFQ in order to provide multi-rate weighted max-min fairness for layered multicast flows, and eliminates the need for multicast receivers to perform rate adaptation using join experiments. Preliminary performance results using the ns-2 simulator demonstrate that it is possible to achieve service differentiation for multicast flows without maintaining any per-flow state in the core of the network.