Inter-Provider QoS Peering for IP Service Offering Across Multiple Domains

Providers must interact more closely with each other for providing end-to-end QoS for the global Internet. The focus of this paper is to propose new techniques for providing these interactions in propagating QoS-based agreements among the set of providers involved in the chain of inter-domain service delivery. These providers' interactions occur at the service layer that result in the establishment of QoS- aware service agreements between providers. This needs to be supported by appropriate service management and traffic engineering capabilities per provider domain as well as by BGP-based interactions at the IP layer. The concepts of how to build such agreements are discussed and models for inter-domain QoS peering are proposed. By taking into account the loosely coupled structure of the Internet, we adopt a hop-by-hop, cascaded model in which each provider establishes agreements with its directly attached peers. Once these agreements are in place and networks are provisioned and engineered, QoS-based services can be offered. Targeted value-added services are identified and the methods of supporting the bi- directionality for these services are also proposed.