2963: A Rate Adaptive Shaper for Differentiated Services.

This memo describes several Rate Adaptive Shapers (RAS) that can be used in combination with the single rate Three Color Markers (srTCM) and the two rate Three Color Marker (trTCM) described in RFC2697 and RFC2698, respectively. These RAS improve the performance of TCP when a TCM is used at the ingress of a diffserv network by reducing the burstiness of the traffic. With TCP traffic, this reduction of the burstiness is accompanied by a reduction of the number of marked packets and by an improved TCP goodput. The proposed RAS can be used at the ingress of Diffserv networks providing the Assured Forwarding Per Hop Behavior (AF PHB). They are especially useful when a TCM is used to mark traffic composed of a small number of TCP connections.