A generic architecture for management and control of end-to-end quality of service over multiple domains

Currently, service providers and network operators are exploring new business opportunities that can be found in offering packages of advanced highly customized services to both residential and corporate subscribers. The semantics of these services will be more sophisticated, their access will be better controlled, their usage will be more flexible in time (scheduled) and space (mobile access), and their delivery will be possible with different grades of Quality of Service (QoS). Multimedia services such as video conferencing, distance learning, tele surgery, or dynamic and scheduled trunk provisioning, subject to certain Subject Level Agreements (e.g. corporate VPNs), are just a few examples of services with higher semantics. Although these services could have a high market potential, their implementation and delivery are hampered by the lack of an efficient, flexible and integrated network and service management system. Particularly, in the network management domain we encounter the following three problems. First, the setup of multimedia streams with end-to-end QoS over multiple administrative business domains is impossible without adequate federating mechanisms between network management systems. Secondly, dynamic and flexible interworking mechanisms between different technology domains is ubiquitous for the automatic provisioning of trails over a set of heterogeneous networked systems (e.g. from ATM in the access to IP in the core, from MPLS to DWDM, or from Frame Relay to ATM). Third, management of end-to-end QoS is not only a matter of network QoS. Management of QoS in end terminals and end devices or at a web server is an integral part of the global QoS delivery process. The Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA) has defined a distributed and integrated computational platform for the management and delivery of QoS based services. This paper starts from a state of the art TINA system and elaborates potential enhancements and extensions in order to bring a solution for each of the three previous issues.

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