Provisioning of Inter-Domain QoS-Aware Services

Cooperation among service providers, network providers, and access providers in the Internet allows the creation of new services to offer to customers that are in other domains, thus increasing revenue. However, the Internet heterogeneous environment, where each provider has its own policies, infrastructure and business goals, hinders the deployment of more advanced communication services. This paper presents a Quality of Service (QoS) for Inter-Domain Services (QIDS) model that allows inter-domain QoS-aware services to be defined, configured, and adapted in a dynamic and on-demand fashion, among service providers. This is accomplished by: 1) the use of a common communication channel (business layer) where service providers publish and search for services, and interact with each other to contract and manage these services; 2) the templates to specify the business and technical characteristics of the services; 3) the automatic composition of services using service elements (smaller services) according to performance and service-specific QoS parameters; and 4) the creation and enforcement of configuration rules for the underlying infrastructure. A prototype was implemented to validate QIDS and performance tests were conducted on an inter-domain Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)/Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Virtual Private Network (VPN) scenario.