Implementation of a Simple Bandwidth Broker for DiffServ Networks

To date, QoS solutions that have been developed are confined to enterprise networks due to the scalability problems in inter-domain QoS provisioning. Therefore implementing a service that guarantees end-to-end QoS across the Internet has yet to be fully realised. It is believed that such a service will need to evolve regionally, then nationally and, finally, on a global scale in the same way that the Internet became a global network. By developing such a system, regional and national Network Service Providers (NSP) can be influenced more easily to provide guaranteed QoS for its users, by enabling them to generate revenue from service differentiations in IP networks. Implementation of a QoS management framework is required in order to create end-to-end services across multiple administrative domains. Such a framework also offers easier integration of accounting, billing and security. A Differentiated Services (DiffServ) network alone is not sufficient to address the end-to-end guarantees in network layer service provision but, significantly, it does show great potential for scalability. In order to address the aforementioned problems, a centralised, QoS, management architecture has been proposed – called a Bandwidth Broker (BB). The implementation of a fully automated BB in a single administrative domain is outlined in this paper. The importance of implementing such a BB is ease of extendibility to any other QoS mechanisms such as IntServ and MPLS as well as concepts of Inter-domain QoS, Traffic Engineering, Policy QoS and Mobility Management with QoS. This paper does not intend to investigate those particular extended concepts and restricts implementation of the BB to a single DiffServ domain.