Provisioning for interdomain quality of service: the MESCAL approach

This article presents an architecture for supporting interdomain QoS across the multi-provider global Internet. While most research to date has focused on supporting QoS within a single administrative domain, mature solutions are not yet available for the provision of QoS across multiple domains administered by different organizations. The architecture described in this article encompasses the full set of functions required in the management (service and resource), control and data planes for the provision of end-to-end QoS-based IP connectivity services. We use the concept of QoS classes and show how these can be cascaded using service level specifications (SLSs) agreed between BGP peer domains to construct a defined end-to-end QoS. We illustrate the architecture by describing a typical operational scenario.