What is QoS-Enhanced BGP (q-BGP)

IP networks are the federative transport networks for a large set of emerging services. These services demand hard guarantees in term of the service availability, experienced Quality of Service (QoS) and robustness. Moreover, to be able to reach customers on a large scale, most of these services should be deployed with an Inter-domain scope. In order to meet QoS requirements of these services in an interdomain context, several issues should be solved. This chapter focuses on two issues: provider-to-provider agreements and enhancements to inter-domain routing protocol to convey QoS-related information. A concept called Meta-QoS-Class is introduced together with an enriched version of Border Gateway Protocol. This chapter provides a framework suitable for the promotion of QoS-enabled services with an inter-domain scope: the Parallel Internet. This concept is a viable way for the management of IP resources so as to deliver end-to-end QoS-enabled services.