NSIS development in the EuQoS Project scope
Authors
Abstract
With the increasing services available in the Internet, more and more people are dependentof it. Quality in the communications is becoming a requirement for some services, but the
current network is unable to provide it. There are several studies concerning Quality of
Service (QoS) assurance, but the support of new services with strict performance
requirements is still an open issue.
Signalling is a very important base for QoS because it allows information sharing among
network components. Therefore, the requirements of specific sessions can be supported by
sharing their QoS requirements between the endpoints involved in the communication.
The European project End-to-end Quality of Service support over heterogeneous networks
(EuQoS) was proposed with the aim of finding a solution to the QoS problem in the actual
Internet. The project aim is to research, develop, integrate, test, validate, trial and
demonstrate an end-to-end QoS technology to support advanced QoS assurance over
multiple heterogeneous networks.
A signalling protocol was needed to enable EuQoS with the required signalling functions.
This signalling must provide the interchange of network information across heterogeneous
networks for the assurance of QoS. However, none of the existing network signalling
protocols was adequate to the EuQoS network signalling problem. This was due to the
need of signalling the specific entities in the domains, instead of doing an on-path
signalling approach.
The Next Steps in Signalling (NSIS) framework being defined in the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF) seamed to be the best approach to the EuQoS signalling problem. The
NSIS framework was developed following the IETF specifications and was integrated in
the EuQoS project.
Since NSIS specifications did not fulfil all the EuQoS signalling requirements, namely the
off-path signalling capability, a new proposal for a protocol specification was made to
integrate the NSIS framework and presented to the IETF standardization body. The
proposed signalling protocol is named Hybrid on-path off-path approach for end-to-end
signalling across NSIS domains (HyPath).
The work performed during this dissertation involved the contribution to the EuQoS
solution to the QoS problem in the Internet, the NSIS development and the HyPath
proposal.
The author's role in the EuQoS project has been diversified. The main participation was in
the prototype development, the integration of the several modules and the deployment of
the several versions in the testbeds. He was responsible for the demonstration and
explanation of the prototype (mainly the signalling aspect of it) to the European
Commission that evaluated the project. Beside theses tasks he was also responsible for the
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management and implementation of several EuQoS tasks in the University of Coimbra.
One of these tasks was the management and support of the NSIS development. The
General Internet Signaling Transport (GIST) layer and the HyPath development were the
main tasks of management and support the author was responsible for. He was also the
main author of the HyPath IETF Internet Draft. Most of the IETF work required to update
and submit this document and gather IETF support to it was also his responsibility.
This dissertation describes the work done in the EuQoS project, the NSIS development and
the IETF activities in which the author was involved in.