Interdomain QoS Paths Finding Based on Overlay Topology and QoS Negotiation Approach

The real time multimedia services, delivered on Internet networks, raised new challenges for the network regarding the end to end (E2E) quality of services (QoS) control in order to ensure the proper delivery of the services from content provider (source) to content consumer (destination). But, despite a lot of studies and research done, the actual traffic processing in real Internet deployments is still mostly best effort. Several approaches have been proposed, focused on provisioning aspects – usually solved in the management plane and then performing monitoring and adjustments in the control plane: e.g., well known dynamic techniques have been standardized, like IntServ, Diffserv, or combinations. Offering multimedia services in multi-domain heterogeneous environments is an additional challenge at network/ transport level. Service management is important here for provisioning, offering, handling, and fulfilling variety of services. Appropriate means are needed to enable a large number of providers in order to extend their QoS offerings over multiple domains. To this aim, an integrated management system can be a solution to preserve each domain independency while offering integration at a higher (overlay) layer in order to achieve E2E controllable behaviour. This chapter deals with the problem of establishing QoS enabled aggregated multi-domain paths, to be later used for many individual streams. A general framework is described exposing the ideas of overlay topologies solutions. Then a simple but extendable procedure is proposed, running at management level, to find (through communication between domain managers) several potential inter-domain end to end paths. Then, using a resource negotiation process performed also in the management plane, QoS enabled aggregated pipes, spanning several IP domains, are established. All these functions are performed at an overlay level, based on abstract characterization of intra and inter-domain capabilities delivered by an intra-domain resource manager. This is important in the sense that each domain (or, Autonomous System – AS) can preserve its own independency in terms of resource management. The subsystem is part of an integrated management multi-domain system, dedicated to end to end distribution of multimedia streams. The QoS path finding solution presented here is not like a traditional routing process: it is not implemented on routers, and it does not choose a route between network devices, but between two or more nodes of an overlay virtual topology described at inter-domain level. 16