Resource reservation with Boomerang via open interfaces

This paper presents a prototype system for quality of service (QoS) enabled network according to the Multiservice Switching Forum´s (MSF) architecture. The Multiservice Switching Forum proposes the separation of the control (signaling) and data (forwarding) plane of network elements in its mission statement by using open interfaces. This allows service providers to deploy services with components from multiple vendors. In our system the data forwarding/switching devices are separated from resource reservation controllers, thus providing quality of service guarantees. The Boomerang resource reservation protocol was implemented on a single Linux router so far, now we present our architecture in that each node consists of a separate Linux Boomerang controller and a commercial router or switch. The performance of signaling is an important issue in the current high-speed networks, where the time consumption of the call setup is not negligible. This paper analyzes the signaling demands of the different open control interfaces and compares the calculated signaling delay with the standard, non-MSF architecture