Proposal of the Architecture of a QoS Assured Network by Cooperating between IP Flow Control and MPLS DiffServ-TE

This paper proposes a network architecture to achieve a QoS assured network, which is composed of two QoS control technologies such as IP flow control and MPLS DiffServ-TE. IP flow control technology is utilized to treat IP packets as an IP flow distinguished by source and destination IP addresses, ports, protocol and priority and to apply the CAC function on the per- flow basis. MPLS DiffServ-TE is also used to accommodate multiple IP flows along the LSP via a bandwidth guarantee with certain service classes. By using the network testbed, we confirmed some of functions in our proposed architecture of the QoS assured network worked properly following the CAC capability of flow state routing and LSP-based bandwidth guarantee of MPLS DiffServ-TE. Multiple IP flows can be appropriately conveyed over the assigned LSP. Moreover, we verified the operation of the prototype NMS to monitor IP flows, LSPs and the inclusion relationship between them. And we also derived a policy to set the bandwidth for CAC at the edge router for effective utilization of bandwidth.