Ethernet Access Networks Resources Sharing from a Signalling Perspective

The motivation for network signalling has traditionally aroused from the need to offer quality of service (QoS) to applications. To meet this need architectures and protocols like IntServ and RSVP had been developed and extended over the last decade. Generally speaking, the signaled portion of the network comprises the path along the sender and receiver of a session. Recently, signalling protocols have been designed to support, in addition to QoS, different network resources that could be required by the application´s context. Such generalization was one of the key motivations behind the specification of the NSIS signalling protocol. At this work we present relevant emerging scenarios that illustrate how signalling mechanisms can be employed at different contexts, and propose an extension to allow the NSIS protocol to work seamless within Ethernet access networks to support resource sharing. Our long-haul goal is to propose an architecture based on NSIS to support these key scenarios inside the context of LAN networks.