Decoupling Losses for End-to-End Bandwidth Guarantees in Interdomain Traffic

This paper describes a network architecture for supporting interdomain QoS in hierarchical topologies with multiple ISPs, as the Internet. We propose the combination of a loss differentiation mechanism in access ISPs and a mechanism which guarantees bandwidth to aggregates of flows in the upper tier in order to achieve end-to-end proportional differentiation, in terms of losses and throughput, between classes of flows. The deployment of these QoS mechanisms does not need a global cooperation between ISPs, which overcomes some of the difficulties that frequently arise in the problems related to interdomain quality of service provisioning. The article presents simulation results for a two-tier topology showing the benefits and performance of the model proposed, using TCP and UDP flows.