End-to-end QoS architecture for 4G scenarios

This paper describes the QoS architecture and the corresponding QoS signalling protocols to be developed inside the IST project Daidalos. We address the main results achieved in terms of the definition of the QoS components and its interfaces, the description of the application and network services, definition of the signalling scenarios for the integration of the QoS signalling with the application signalling and with mobility approaches, and specification of the intra- and inter- domain QoS control approaches. We also describe the QoS management of the system, through the Policy–based Management System, and a Real-time Network Monitoring system able to aid in admission control with the results of active and passive measurements. All the elements, interfaces and functionalities take into account multicast services and inherent broadcast networks

A policy-based management architecture for flexible service deployment in active networks

This paper describes a dynamic, scalable and extensible policy-based network management (PBNM) system that is fully integrated with a service provisioning architectures for active networks. The key result is network customisation according to the needs of the different service providers and its end users. Our component-based service provisioning architecture enables us to render service- and user-specific requirements, across single/multiple administrative domains, at deployment time and to dynamically map service components onto the network using the corresponding management policies. The architecture presented in this paper describes the approach undertaken by the IST-FAIN research project as well as the main issues that we encounter in developing and integrating the PBNM with the service provisioning mechanism

New Challenges in Quality of Services Control Architectures in Next Generation Networks

A mesura que Internet i les xarxes IP s'han anat integrant dins la societat i les corporacions, han anat creixent les expectatives de nous serveis convergents així com les expectatives de qualitat en les comunicacions. Les Next Generation Networks (NGN) donen resposta a les noves necessitats i representen el nou paradigma d'Internet a partir de la convergència IP. Un dels aspectes menys desenvolupats de les NGN és el control de la Qualitat del Servei (QoS), especialment crític en les comunicacions multimèdia a través de xarxes heterogènies i/o de diferents operadors. A més a més, les NGN incorporen nativament el protocol IPv6 que, malgrat les deficiències i esgotament d'adreces IPv4, encara no ha tingut l'impuls definitiu.Aquesta tesi està enfocada des d'un punt de vista pràctic. Així doncs, per tal de poder fer recerca sobre xarxes de proves (o testbeds) que suportin IPv6 amb garanties de funcionament, es fa un estudi en profunditat del protocol IPv6, del seu grau d'implementació i dels tests de conformància i interoperabilitat existents que avaluen la qualitat d'aquestes implementacions. A continuació s'avalua la qualitat de cinc sistemes operatius que suporten IPv6 mitjançant un test de conformància i s'implementa el testbed IPv6 bàsic, a partir del qual es farà la recerca, amb la implementació que ofereix més garanties.El QoS Broker és l'aportació principal d'aquesta tesi: un marc integrat que inclou un sistema automatitzat per gestionar el control de la QoS a través de sistemes multi-domini/multi-operador seguint les recomanacions de les NGN. El sistema automatitza els mecanismes associats a la configuració de la QoS dins d'un mateix domini (sistema autònom) mitjançant la gestió basada en polítiques de QoS i automatitza la negociació dinàmica de QoS entre QoS Brokers de diferents dominis, de forma que permet garantir QoS extrem-extrem sense fissures. Aquesta arquitectura es valida sobre un testbed de proves multi-domini que utilitza el mecanisme DiffServ de QoS i suporta IPv6.L'arquitectura definida en les NGN permet gestionar la QoS tant a nivell 3 (IP) com a nivell 2 (Ethernet, WiFi, etc.) de forma que permet gestionar també xarxes PLC. Aquesta tesi proposa una aproximació teòrica per aplicar aquesta arquitectura de control, mitjançant un QoS Broker, a les noves xarxes PLC que s'estan acabant d'estandarditzar, i discuteix les possibilitats d'aplicació sobre les futures xarxes de comunicació de les Smart Grids.Finalment, s'integra en el QoS Broker un mòdul per gestionar l'enginyeria del tràfic optimitzant els dominis mitjançant tècniques de intel·ligència artificial. La validació en simulacions i sobre un testbed amb routers Cisco demostra que els algorismes genètics híbrids són una opció eficaç en aquest camp.En general, les observacions i avenços assolits en aquesta tesi contribueixen a augmentar la comprensió del funcionament de la QoS en les NGN i a preparar aquests sistemes per afrontar problemes del món real de gran complexitat.A medida que Internet y las redes IP se han ido integrando dentro de la sociedad y las corporaciones, han ido creciendo las expectativas de nuevos servicios convergentes así como las expectativas de calidad en las comunicaciones. Las Next Generation Networks (NGN) dan respuesta a las nuevas necesidades y representan el nuevo paradigma de Internet a partir de la convergencia IP. Uno de los aspectos menos desarrollados de las NGN es el control de la Calidad del Servicio (QoS), especialmente crítico en las comunicaciones multimedia a través de redes heterogéneas y/o de diferentes operadores. Además, las NGN incorporan nativamente el protocolo IPv6 que, a pesar de las deficiencias y agotamiento de direcciones IPv4, aún no ha tenido el impulso definitivo.Esta tesis está enfocada desde un punto de vista práctico. Así pues, con tal de poder hacer investigación sobre redes de prueba (o testbeds) que suporten IPv6 con garantías de funcionamiento, se hace un estudio en profundidad del protocolo IPv6, de su grado de implementación y de los tests de conformancia e interoperabilidad existentes que evalúan la calidad de estas implementaciones. A continuación se evalua la calidad de cinco sistemas operativos que soportan IPv6 mediante un test de conformancia y se implementa el testbed IPv6 básico, a partir del cual se realizará la investigación, con la implementación que ofrece más garantías.El QoS Broker es la aportación principal de esta tesis: un marco integrado que incluye un sistema automatitzado para gestionar el control de la QoS a través de sistemas multi-dominio/multi-operador siguiendo las recomendaciones de las NGN. El sistema automatiza los mecanismos asociados a la configuración de la QoS dentro de un mismo dominio (sistema autónomo) mediante la gestión basada en políticas de QoS y automatiza la negociación dinámica de QoS entre QoS brokers de diferentes dominios, de forma que permite garantizar QoS extremo-extremo sin fisuras. Esta arquitectura se valida sobre un testbed de pruebas multi-dominio que utiliza el mecanismo DiffServ de QoS y soporta IPv6. La arquitectura definida en las NGN permite gestionar la QoS tanto a nivel 3 (IP) o como a nivel 2 (Ethernet, WiFi, etc.) de forma que permite gestionar también redes PLC. Esta tesis propone una aproximación teórica para aplicar esta arquitectura de control, mediante un QoS Broker, a las noves redes PLC que se están acabando de estandardizar, y discute las posibilidades de aplicación sobre las futuras redes de comunicación de las Smart Grids.Finalmente, se integra en el QoS Broker un módulo para gestionar la ingeniería del tráfico optimizando los dominios mediante técnicas de inteligencia artificial. La validación en simulaciones y sobre un testbed con routers Cisco demuestra que los algoritmos genéticos híbridos son una opción eficaz en este campo.En general, las observaciones y avances i avances alcanzados en esta tesis contribuyen a augmentar la comprensión del funcionamiento de la QoS en las NGN y en preparar estos sistemas para afrontar problemas del mundo real de gran complejidad.The steady growth of Internet along with the IP networks and their integration into society and corporations has brought with it increased expectations of new converged services as well as greater demands on quality in communications. The Next Generation Networks (NGNs) respond to these new needs and represent the new Internet paradigm from the IP convergence. One of the least developed aspects in the NGNs is the Quality of Service (QoS) control, which is especially critical in the multimedia communication through heterogeneous networks and/or different operators. Furthermore, the NGNs natively incorporate the IPv6 protocol which, despite its shortcomings and the depletion of IPv4 addresses has not been boosted yet.This thesis has been developed with a practical focus. Therefore, with the aim of carrying out research over testbeds supporting the IPv6 with performance guarantees, an in-depth study of the IPv6 protocol development has been conducted and its degree of implementation and the existing conformance and interoperability tests that evaluate these implementations have been studied. Next, the quality of five implementations has been evaluated through a conformance test and the basic IPv6 testbed has been implemented, from which the research will be carried out. The QoS Broker is the main contribution to this thesis: an integrated framework including an automated system for QoS control management through multi-domain/multi-operator systems according to NGN recommendations. The system automates the mechanisms associated to the QoS configuration inside the same domain (autonomous system) through policy-based management and automates the QoS dynamic negotiation between peer QoS Brokers belonging to different domains, so it allows the guarantee of seamless end-to-end QoS. This architecture is validated over a multi-domain testbed which uses the QoS DiffServ mechanism and supports IPv6.The architecture defined in the NGN allows QoS management at level 3 (IP) as well as at level 2 (e.g. Ethernet, WiFi) so it also facilitates the management of PLC networks. Through the use of a QoS Broker, this thesis proposes a theoretical approach for applying this control architecture to the newly standardized PLC networks, and discusses the possibilities of applying it over the future communication networks of the Smart Grids.Finally, a module for managing traffic engineering which optimizes the network domains through artificial intelligence techniques is integrated in the QoS Broker. The validations by simulations and over a Cisco router testbed demonstrate that hybrid genetic algorithms are an effective option in this area.Overall, the advances and key insights provided in this thesis help advance our understanding of QoS functioning in the NGNs and prepare these systems to face increasingly complex problems, which abound in current industrial and scientific applications

Policy based network management of legacy network elements in next generation networks for voice services

Magister Scientiae - MScTelecommunication companies, service providers and large companies are now adapting converged multi-service Next Generation Networks (NGNs). Network management is shifting from managing Network Elements (NE) to managing services. This paradigm shift coincides with the rapid development of Quality of Service (QoS) protocols for IP networks. NEs and services are managed with Policy Based Network Management (PBNM) which is most concerned with managing services that require QoS using the Common Open Policy Service (COPS) Protocol. These services include Voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing and video streaming. It follows that legacy NEs without support for QoS need to be replaced and/or excluded from the network. However, since most of these services run over IP, and legacy NEs easily supports IP, it may be unnecessary to throw away legacy NEs if it can be made to fit within a PBNM approach. Our approach enables an existing PBNM system to include legacy NEs in its management paradigm. The Proxy-Policy Enforcement Point (P-PEP) and Queuing Policy Enforcement Point (Q-PEP) can enforce some degree of traffic shaping on a gateway to the legacy portion of the network. The P-PEP utilises firewall techniques using the common legacy and contemporary NE management protocol Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) while the Q-PEP uses queuing techniques in the form Class Based Queuing (CBQ) and Random Early Discard (RED) for traffic control.South Afric

Service management for multi-domain Active Networks

The Internet is an example of a multi-agent system. In our context, an agent is synonymous with network operators, Internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers. ISPs mutually interact for connectivity's sake, but the fact remains that two peering agents are inevitably self-interested. Egoistic behaviour manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, the ISPs are able to act in an environment where different ISPs would have different spheres of influence, in the sense that they will have control and management responsibilities over different parts of the environment. On the other hand, contention occurs when an ISP intends to sell resources to another, which gives rise to at least two of its customers sharing (hence contending for) a common transport medium. The multi-agent interaction was analysed by simulating a game theoretic approach and the alignment of dominant strategies adopted by agents with evolving traits were abstracted. In particular, the contention for network resources is arbitrated such that a self-policing environment may emerge from a congested bottleneck. Over the past 5 years, larger ISPs have simply peddled as fast as they could to meet the growing demand for bandwidth by throwing bandwidth at congestion problems. Today, the dire financial positions of Worldcom and Global Crossing illustrate, to a certain degree, the fallacies of over-provisioning network resources. The proposed framework in this thesis enables subscribers of an ISP to monitor and police each other's traffic in order to establish a well-behaved norm in utilising limited resources. This framework can be expanded to other inter-domain bottlenecks within the Internet. One of the main objectives of this thesis is also to investigate the impact on multi-domain service management in the future Internet, where active nodes could potentially be located amongst traditional passive routers. The advent of Active Networking technology necessitates node-level computational resource allocations, in addition to prevailing resource reservation approaches for communication bandwidth. Our motivation is to ensure that a service negotiation protocol takes account of these resources so that the response to a specific service deployment request from the end-user is consistent and predictable. To promote the acceleration of service deployment by means of Active Networking technology, a pricing model is also evaluated for computational resources (e.g., CPU time and memory). Previous work in these areas of research only concentrate on bandwidth (i.e., communication) - related resources. Our pricing approach takes account of both guaranteed and best-effort service by adapting the arbitrage theorem from financial theory. The central tenet for our approach is to synthesise insights from different disciplines to address problems in data networks. The greater parts of research experience have been obtained during direct and indirect participation in the 1ST-10561 project known as FAIN (Future Active IP Networks) and ACTS-AC338 project called MIAMI (Mobile Intelligent Agent for Managing the Information Infrastructure). The Inter-domain Manager (IDM) component was integrated as an integral part of the FAIN policy-based network management systems (PBNM). Its monitoring component (developed during the MIAMI project) learns about routing changes that occur within a domain so that the management system and the managed nodes have the same topological view of the network. This enabled our reservation mechanism to reserve resources along the existing route set up by whichever underlying routing protocol is in place

Distribuição de políticas de gerenciamento de redes com ênfase em qualidade de serviço

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação.O gerenciamento redes tem com finalidade conservar o funcionamento da rede como um todo, desde os serviços apresentados aos usuários à transmissão dos dados. Conforme a evolução das redes, o gerenciamento assumiu papel cada vez mais destacado, onde os administradores de rede aprendem que adicionar largura de banda não é capaz de resolver problemas relacionados ao tráfego. Logo, reservar ou diferenciar recursos não é garantir qualidade de serviços. Neste contexto desenvolver novas formas de gerenciamento de rede é fundamentalmente importante

QoS Abstraction Layer in 4G Access Networks

Tese de Mestrado. Redes e Serviços de Comunicação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Network-Based Management for Optimising Video Delivery

The past decade has witnessed a massive increase in Internet video traffic. The Cisco Visual Forecast index indicates that, by 2022, (79%) of the world's mobile data traffic will be video traffic. In order to increase the video streaming market revenue, service providers need to provide services to the end-users characterised by high Quality of Experience (QoE). However, delivering good-quality video services is a very challenging task due to the stringent constraints related to bandwidth and latency requirements in video streaming. Among the available streaming services, HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) has become the de facto standard for multimedia delivery over the Internet. HAS is a pull-based approach, since the video player at the client side is responsible for adapting the requested video based on the estimated network conditions. Furthermore, HAS can traverse any firewall or proxy server that lets through standard HTTP data traffic over content delivery networks. Despite the great benefits HAS solutions bring, they also face challenges relating to quality fluctuations when they compete for a shared link. To overcome these issues, the network and video providers must exchange information and cooperate. In this context, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging technology used to deploy such architecture by providing centralised control for efficient and flexible network management. One of the first problems addressed in this thesis is that of providing QoE-level fairness for the competing HAS players and efficient resource allocation for the available network resources. This has been achieved by presenting a dynamic programming-based algorithm, based on the concept of Max-Min fairness, to provide QoE-level fairness among the competing HAS players. In order to deploy the proposed algorithm, an SDN-based architecture has been presented, named BBGDASH, that leverages the flexibility of the SDN’s management and control to deploy the proposed algorithm on the application and the network level. Another question answered by this thesis is that of how the proposed guidance approach maintains a balance between stability and scalability. To answer this question, a scalable guidance mechanism has been presented that provides guidance to the client without moving the entire control logic to an additional entity or relying purely on the client-side decision. To do so, the guidance scheme provides each client with the optimal bitrate levels to adapt the requested bitrate within the provided levels. Although the proposed BGGDASH can improve the QoE within a wired network, deploying it in a wireless network environment could result in sub-optimal decisions being made due to the high level of fluctuations in the wireless environment. In order to cope with this issue, two time series-based forecasting approaches have been presented to identify the optimal set of bitrate levels for each client based on the network conditions. Additionally, the implementation of the BBGDASH architecture has been extended by proposing an intelligent streaming architecture (named BBGDASH+). Finally, in order to evaluate the feasibility of deploying the bounding bitrate guidance with different network conditions, it has been evaluated under different network conditions to provide generic evaluations. The results show that the proposed algorithms can significantly improve the end-users QoE compared to other compared approaches