Traffic engineering and quality of service management for IP-based next generation networks

Summary form only given. Next generation IP-based networks will offer quality of service (QoS) guarantees by deploying technologies such as differentiated services (DiffServ) and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) for traffic engineering and network-wide resource management. A number of issues still exist regarding edge-to-edge intra-domain and inter-domain QoS provisioning and management. The tutorial focuses on architectures and frameworks for the management and control of such networks, including the following aspects: emerging service level agreements (SLAs) and service level specifications (SLSs) for the subscription to QoS-based services; management protocols for off-line service negotiation and signaling mechanisms for the dynamic invocation of service instances (e.g., RSVP to the network edge); approaches for the derivation of a traffic matrix based on subscribed SLAs/SLSs and monitoring data; algorithms for off-line traffic engineering and provisioning through MPLS or through plain IP routing with QoS extensions; algorithms for dynamic resource management to deal with traffic fluctuations outside the predicted envelope; a policy-based overall framework for traffic engineering and service management. Finally, ongoing work towards inter-domain QoS provisioning is presented.