DIFFSERV BASED QOS PERFORMANCE STUDY OF VIDEO CONFERENCING APPLICATION USING TRADITIONAL IP AND MPLS-TE NETWORKS OVER IPV4 AND IPV6

Abstract

With the constant evolution in the communication industry and development in the network technology, demand for more sophisticated and quality assured multimedia applications has increased. Although Differentiated Services (DiffServ) model can be deployed over the traditional Internet Protocol (IP) based networks to ensure QoS, it is unable to provide a guaranteed end-to-end QoS to the network. Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is one of the recent technologies that is being used as a backbone network to provide QoS on account of its Traffic Engineering (TE) capabilities. Use of DiffServ as the dedicated QoS model over MPLS-TE networks can lead to a significant improvement in the quality of the services provided by the network. IPv4 is the basic network layer protocol currently in use over the Internet. With technological advances and increase in number of users and their requirements, IPv4 is proving to be insufficient. IPv6 is the latest version of the Internet Protocol that can potentially takeover as the basic network layer protocol. In this paper, an attempt has been made to study and improve the QoS performance of the video conferencing application by using DiffServ-aware MPLS-TE network. Comparison of delay, jitter, packet loss and throughput as QoS parameters has been done over the network using IPv4 and IPv6. It has been seen that MPLS-TE networks show an improved performance as compared to traditional IP networks, with a further upgrade in performance over IPv6.