EUROPEAN TRANSACTIONS ON TELECOMMUNICATIONS Eur. Trans. Telecomms. 2008; 19:635–652 Published online 14 June 2007 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ett.1241 Communication Networks IntServ6: an approach to support QoS over IPv6 wired and wireless networks Jhon J. Padilla 1,2 * and Josep Paradells 2 1 Pontificia Bolivariana University, Colombia 2 Technical University of Catalonia, Spain SUMMARY In this paper we propose a new approach for Quality of Service (QoS) support on Internet. This approach, named IntServ6, is based on the Integrated Services Architecture (ISA). It takes advantage of the IPv6 header flow label field to improve a set of the standard ISA properties such as reservations within tunnels, flows aggregation and interconnection with MPLS transport networks. IntServ6 can be used for QoS support in IPv6 wired and wireless networks. This paper describes the IntServ6 operation and performance evaluation over both environments. Evaluation results show that this approach has a better router performance with respect to the standard IntServ. Thus, IntServ6 reduces the mean packet delay and reduces the packet delay dependence with the mobility. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1. INTRODUCTION Next generation networks will be based on IPv6 protocol. As a result, these networks will have issues that the stan- dard IPv4 cannot support such as a great IP addresses num- ber, users mobility, Quality of Service (QoS), security, etc. Such networks will have to support several services classes for elastic applications and real time applications. Under this environment, the QoS support capability is an impor- tant issue for these networks. Nowadays, to support QoS on the Internet there are mainly two standard architectures: Integrated Services Architecture (ISA) and Differentiated Services Architecture (DSA). ISA can be used on access networks since it easily adapts to the user’s requirements. However, it has scalability problems. On the other side, DSA is very scalable but it cannot easily fit the final user’s requirements. Therefore, it is useful for transport net- works. On a third side, the Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) supports traffic engineering principles. As a result, MPLS can be used either with ISA or DSA in order to support QoS in a better way on the Internet. Our approach, named IntServ6 is based on Integrated Services but with an important difference in the classifica- tion process: while standard ISA (also named IntServ) uses the five-tuple for the packet classification, IntServ6 uses the IPv6 flow label field to identify the flow a packet belongs to. This idea is not new and it is the original goal of the flow label field within the IPv6 protocol header. However, this field has not been used for this purpose. Besides, the flow label field utilisation has not been com- pletely standardised. Although current standards describe general recommendations [1, 2], they are not clear yet about the specific use of this field. The use of the flow label field to classify the packets on IntServ6 improves the rou- ter performance and several issues in which standard IntServ currently has solutions with some disadvantages. These issues include flows aggregation, reservations within tunnels and interconnection with transport networks. Received 9 May 2006 Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Revised 25 October 2006 Accepted 26 April 2007 *Correspondence to: Jhon J. Padilla, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana Ingenierı ´a Electro ´nica, Km 7 Via Piedecuesta, Bucaramanga, Colombia. E-mail: jpadilla@upbbga.edu.co