An Information Model for the Provisioning of Network Connections Enabling Customer-Specific End-to-End QoS Guarantees

The growing significance of international collaborations in research, education, and business fields has raised the demand for the assurance of the quality of the network connections which the projects and applications are realized upon. A large spectrum of examples with diverse requirements is found in areas such as GRID- and Cloud computing, eLearning, and video-conferencing. The consequences of these diverse project and application requirements culminate in the urgent necessity to provide an End-to-End (E2E) guarantee for any customer-specific or user-tailored combination of service-specific Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. The quality of the overall network connections provided to users obviously directly depends on the quality of the involved connection parts. This means that already during the setup negotiation process the quality of the available connection parts has to be considered. Especially for international connections it is common that multiple independent service providers (SPs) realize different connection segments. This means in turn, that during the information exchange about available connection parts not only the technical challenges have to be solved, but also preferences and restrictions of the involved provider domains must be considered. In this paper we present a novel information model for the description of such connections. In the proposed model, a multi-domain view is derived from the single-domain perspectives of each considered SP. This model serves as a pro-found basis for an end-to-end routing algorithm which considers multiple user specific QoS parameters in parallel. The proposed model also accounts for the typically very restrictive SP information policies.