Pre-Congestion Notification (PCN) Architecture

This document describes a general architecture for flow admission and termination based on pre-congestion information in order to protect the quality of service of established, inelastic flows within a single Diffserv domain.\u

Multi Protocol Label Switching: Quality of Service, Traffic Engineering application, and Virtual Private Network application

This thesis discusses the QoS feature, Traffic Engineering (TE) application, and Virtual Private Network (VPN) application of the Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) protocol. This thesis concentrates on comparing MPLS with other prominent technologies such as Internet Protocol (IP), Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), and Frame Relay (FR). MPLS combines the flexibility of Internet Protocol (IP) with the connection oriented approach of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) or Frame Relay (FR). Section 1 lists several advantages MPLS brings over other technologies. Section 2 covers architecture and a brief description of the key components of MPLS. The information provided in Section 2 builds a background to compare MPLS with the other technologies in the rest of the sections. Since it is anticipate that MPLS will be a main core network technology, MPLS is required to work with two currently available QoS architectures: Integrated Service (IntServ) architecture and Differentiated Service (DiffServ) architecture. Even though the MPLS does not introduce a new QoS architecture or enhance the existing QoS architectures, it works seamlessly with both QoS architectures and provides proper QoS support to the customer. Section 3 provides the details of how MPLS supports various functions of the IntServ and DiffServ architectures. TE helps Internet Service Provider (ISP) optimize the use of available resources, minimize the operational costs, and maximize the revenues. MPLS provides efficient TE functions which prove to be superior to IP and ATM/FR. Section 4 discusses how MPLS supports the TE functionality and what makes MPLS superior to other competitive technologies. ATM and FR are still required as a backbone technology in some areas where converting the backbone to IP or MPLS does not make sense or customer demands simply require ATM or FR. In this case, it is important for MPLS to work with ATM and FR. Section 5 highlights the interoperability issues and solutions for MPLS while working in conjunction with ATM and FR. In section 6, various VPN tunnel types are discussed and compared with the MPLS VPN tunnel type. The MPLS VPN tunnel type is concluded as an optimal tunnel approach because it provides security, multiplexing, and the other important features that are reburied by the VPN customer and the ISP. Various MPLS layer 2 and layer 3 VPN solutions are also briefly discussed. In section 7 I conclude with the details of an actual implementation of a layer 3 MPLS VPN solution that works in conjunction with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)

The internet: A global telecommunications solution?

The provision and support of new distributed multimedia services are of prime concern for telecommunications operators and suppliers. Clearly, the potential of the latest Internet protocols to contribute communications components is of considerable interest to them. In this article we first review some of the new types of application and their requirements, and identify the need to support applications that have strict QoS requirements, the so-called critical applications. We review two proposals for enhancing the Internet service architecture. In addition to the integrated services work of the IETF, we look at the more recent proposals for differentiated services in the Internet. We then individually review recent protocol developments proposed to improve the Internet, and to support real-time and multimedia communications. These are IPv6 (the new version of the Internet Protocol), Resource reSerVation Protocol, and Multiprotocol Label Switching, respectively. In each case, we attempt to provide critical reviews in order to assess their suitability for this purpose. Finally, we indicate what the basis of the future infrastructure might be in order to support the full variety of application requirements