iREX MPO : A Multi-Path Option for the iREX Inter-Domain QoS Policy Architecture

The inter-domain Resource Exchange (iREX) architecture uses economic market mechanisms to automate the deployment of end-to-end (E2E) inter-domain (ID) quality of service (QoS) policy among resource consumer and resource provider Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In iREX, each policy reservation is deployed on a single E2E ID path made up of the most "desirable" (i.e. cheapest and least congested) ISP resources. To accommodate ISPs that prefer redundancy when deploying ID QoS policy, in this paper we introduce an extension to the iREX architecture that gives an originating ISP a multi- path option (MPO) when deploying a reservation. MPO takes an initiating ISP\´s preference for redundancy and provides information about the available path options to achieve this preference in a distributed manner. Our simulation results show that while providing redundancy to the originating ISP using MPO does increase its resource costs in accordance to an ISP\´s preference, it only marginally increases overhead, and does not affect overall network performance - in fact the use of MPO lowers congestion.