SLA Establishment with Guaranteed QoS in the Interdomain Network: A Stock Model

The new model that we present in this paper is introduced in the context of guaranteed QoS and resources management in the inter-domain routing framework. This model, called the stock model, is based on a reverse cascade approach and is applied in a distributed context. So transit providers have to learn the right capacities to buy and to stock and, therefore learning theory is applied through an iterative process. We show that transit providers manage to learn how to strategically choose their capacities on each route in order to maximize their benefits, despite the very incomplete information. Finally, we provide and analyse some simulation results given by the application of the model in a simple case where the model quickly converges to a stable state.Comment: 19 pages, 19 figures, IJCNC, http://airccse.org/journal/cnc/0711cnc13.pd

Route selection impacts on achieving enhanced IMS QoS

ArticleThe different planes in the IMS interact via specific reference points to deliver multimedia services to the user. QoS provisioning for IMS communications has been standardized for access networks only, with the assumption of an over provisioned IP core. Effective provisioning of multimedia services requires performance guarantee along the complete path of the sessions. End-to-end QoS in IP networks is affected by the route traversed by the user traffic. Moreover QoS guarantees in one ISP domain are not effective for transit traffic exiting the domain. QoS extensions to exterior gateway routing protocols have been proposed to transfer route QoS information beyond one autonomous system (domain). This paper explores options for mapping inter-domain QoS information learnt on the media plane into control plane session information for IMS QoS control. Through testbed evaluations we show the effect of routing on delays experienced in IMS communications.The different planes in the IMS interact via specific reference points to deliver multimedia services to the user. QoS provisioning for IMS communications has been standardized for access networks only, with the assumption of an over provisioned IP core. Effective provisioning of multimedia services requires performance guarantee along the complete path of the sessions. End-to-end QoS in IP networks is affected by the route traversed by the user traffic. Moreover QoS guarantees in one ISP domain are not effective for transit traffic exiting the domain. QoS extensions to exterior gateway routing protocols have been proposed to transfer route QoS information beyond one autonomous system (domain). This paper explores options for mapping inter-domain QoS information learnt on the media plane into control plane session information for IMS QoS control. Through testbed evaluations we show the effect of routing on delays experienced in IMS communications

Link State Contract Routing

The Internet's simple design resulted in huge success in basic telecommunicationservices. However, the current Internet architecture has failed in terms of introducingmany innovative technologies as end-to-end (E2E) services such as multicasting,guaranteed quality of services (QoS) and many others. We argue that contractingover static service level agreements (SLA) and point-to-anywhere service definitionsare the main reasons behind this failure. In that sense, the Internet architecture needsmajor shifts since it neither allows (i) users to indicate their value choices at sufficientgranularity nor (ii) providers to manage risks involved in investment for new innovativeQoS technologies and business relationships with other providers as well as users.To allow these much needed economic flexibilities, we introduce contract-switching asa new paradigm for the design of future Internet architecture. In this work, we implementcontract-routing framework with specific focus on long-term contracted servicesin Link State Contract Routing scheme. Our work shows that E2e guaranteed QoSservices can be achieved in routing over contracted edge-to-edge service abstractionswhich are built on today's popular protocols with reasonable protocol overhead

Using Tuangou to reduce IP transit costs

A majority of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) support connectivity to the entire Internet by transiting their traffic via other providers. Although the transit prices per Mbps decline steadily, the overall transit costs of these ISPs remain high or even increase, due to the traffic growth. The discontent of the ISPs with the high transit costs has yielded notable innovations such as peering, content distribution networks, multicast, and peer-to-peer localization. While the above solutions tackle the problem by reducing the transit traffic, this paper explores a novel approach that reduces the transit costs without altering the traffic. In the proposed CIPT (Cooperative IP Transit), multiple ISPs cooperate to jointly purchase IP (Internet Protocol) transit in bulk. The aggregate transit costs decrease due to the economies-of-scale effect of typical subadditive pricing as well as burstable billing: not all ISPs transit their peak traffic during the same period. To distribute the aggregate savings among the CIPT partners, we propose Shapley-value sharing of the CIPT transit costs. Using public data about IP traffic of 264 ISPs and transit prices, we quantitatively evaluate CIPT and show that significant savings can be achieved, both in relative and absolute terms. We also discuss the organizational embodiment, relationship with transit providers, traffic confidentiality, and other aspects of CIPT

Combined Intra- and Inter-domain Traffic Engineering using Hot-Potato Aware Link Weights Optimization

A well-known approach to intradomain traffic engineering consists in finding the set of link weights that minimizes a network-wide objective function for a given intradomain traffic matrix. This approach is inadequate because it ignores a potential impact on interdomain routing. Indeed, the resulting set of link weights may trigger BGP to change the BGP next hop for some destination prefixes, to enforce hot-potato routing policies. In turn, this results in changes in the intradomain traffic matrix that have not been anticipated by the link weights optimizer, possibly leading to degraded network performance. We propose a BGP-aware link weights optimization method that takes these effects into account, and even turns them into an advantage. This method uses the interdomain traffic matrix and other available BGP data, to extend the intradomain topology with external virtual nodes and links, on which all the well-tuned heuristics of a classical link weights optimizer can be applied. A key innovative asset of our method is its ability to also optimize the traffic on the interdomain peering links. We show, using an operational network as a case study, that our approach does so efficiently at almost no extra computational cost.Comment: 12 pages, Short version to be published in ACM SIGMETRICS 2008, International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, June 2-6, 2008, Annapolis, Maryland, US

Rethinking Routing and Peering in the era of Vertical Integration of Network Functions

Content providers typically control the digital content consumption services and are getting the most revenue by implementing an all-you-can-eat model via subscription or hyper-targeted advertisements. Revamping the existing Internet architecture and design, a vertical integration where a content provider and access ISP will act as unibody in a sugarcane form seems to be the recent trend. As this vertical integration trend is emerging in the ISP market, it is questionable if existing routing architecture will suffice in terms of sustainable economics, peering, and scalability. It is expected that the current routing will need careful modifications and smart innovations to ensure effective and reliable end-to-end packet delivery. This involves new feature developments for handling traffic with reduced latency to tackle routing scalability issues in a more secure way and to offer new services at cheaper costs. Considering the fact that prices of DRAM or TCAM in legacy routers are not necessarily decreasing at the desired pace, cloud computing can be a great solution to manage the increasing computation and memory complexity of routing functions in a centralized manner with optimized expenses. Focusing on the attributes associated with existing routing cost models and by exploring a hybrid approach to SDN, we also compare recent trends in cloud pricing (for both storage and service) to evaluate whether it would be economically beneficial to integrate cloud services with legacy routing for improved cost-efficiency. In terms of peering, using the US as a case study, we show the overlaps between access ISPs and content providers to explore the viability of a future in terms of peering between the new emerging content-dominated sugarcane ISPs and the healthiness of Internet economics. To this end, we introduce meta-peering, a term that encompasses automation efforts related to peering – from identifying a list of ISPs likely to peer, to injecting control-plane rules, to continuous monitoring and notifying any violation – one of the many outcroppings of vertical integration procedure which could be offered to the ISPs as a standalone service

Tradable Service Level Agreements to Manage Network Resources for Streaming Internet Services

In recent years, supply and demand of streaming applications via the Internet (e.g., video-on-demand, live TV coverage, video conferencing) have increased. The idea behind streaming Internet services is to avoid a time-consuming download, and instead, make the user view streaming content in real-time without delay. However, today’s Internet traffic is routed on a best effort basis without any support for guaranteed service provisioning. Missing traffic prioritization mechanisms to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) and, additionally, the fact that traffic passes several Internet Service Providers (ISP) during transmission is very disadvantageous for the performance of streaming Internet services. Therefore, a solution is presented to enhance existing protocols with QoS mechanisms. Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Operational Level Agreements (OLA) between service providers and service customers are proposed to enforce service guarantees on an economic base and they serve ISPs and Content Service Providers (CSP) to efficiently manage network resources. The concatenation of such contractual agreements between ISPs enables end-to-end-based service provisioning with QoS assurance. A contracting protocol is introduced to control the settlement of contracts and user demands. With the help of service brokers, SLAs could even be traded in a marketplace established for efficient use of limited resources