Abstract
This paper addresses issues related to buffer and bandwidth management for the Expedited Forwarding (EF) traffic class in IP Differentiated Services (DiffServ) networks. We are concerned with edge nodes connecting a number of end-users with premium traffic contracts to the core network and we examine buffer requirements in those nodes. Our results suggest that even in the case of EF traffic class, an amount buffering is essential to provide certain levels of Bit Error Rate (BER) while achieving good utilisation of the existing bandwidth resources; this is in contrast to the current belief that a buffer size of 1 or 2 packets should be enough for the EF traffic class.