Providing Quality of Service across Multiple Providers: The Case of European Research and Academic Space

Introduction

The GN2 European project GÉANT2 (2009) encompasses a range of research activities to advance both networking and user services in Europe. Central to this project, is the goal of providing high-quality services from one end user to another over multiple interconnected networks. The GÉANT2 (2009) network connects 34 countries via 30 national research and education networks (NRENs), using multiple 10Gbps wavelengths. GÉANT2 also connects to worldwide NRENs and the public Internet to ensure a global Gigabit-per-second connectivity for all users.

Quality of Service has been developed as a concept for several years and has reached maturity especially related to L3 implementations, although user demand and provider uptake has not always been as high as expected. The emergence of L2-based network architectures that try to avoid the high costs of high-end routing capabilities and take advantage of direct administration of optical circuits by organizations such as European NRENs, has led to the need for L2 QoS and Bandwidth on Demand services.

GEANT has deployed services in two main areas: The provisioning of L3 QoS based on DiffServ architecture, and the provisioning of Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) based on dynamic allocation of L2 circuits. The GN2 activity that has specified and is now prototyping a Bandwidth on Demand service intended to operate in a multi-domain environment using heterogeneous transmission technologies is called AutoBAHN, while the GN2 activity that has developed a L3 QoS provisioning framework is called AMPS. In addition GN2 has developed a monitoring system for the AutoBAHN service, which has proved in itself a complex and challenging task.

This chapter presents some of the latest developments related to the provisioning of Quality of Service (QoS) in today’s networks and the associated network management structures that are or will be deployed to support them. The remaining of this chapter is structured as follows: The next section presents the international experience in the area of L2 and L3 QoS. Section 3 presents the efforts of GEANT in order to implement and deploy L2 and L3 QoS services. Section 4 presents the future trends in the area. Finally, Section 5 concludes this chapter.