A service-centric IP quality of service architecture for next generation networks

IP Differentiated Services is widely seen as the framework to provide quality of service (QoS) in the Internet in a scalable fashion. However many issues have still not been fully addressed, such as: the way per-hop behaviours can be combined to provide end-to-end services; the specification of admission control and resource reservation mechanisms; and the role of management plane functionality and its integration with the control and data planes. This paper presents the service management aspects of an integrated control and management architecture for supporting end-to-end QoS-based IP services in next generation networks. It introduces a two-phased approach for service negotiation, namely, service subscription followed by service invocation, and describes the interworking between service and resource management based on the concept of a resource provisioning cycle.