Inter-domain Quality of Service Routing: Setting the Grounds for the Way Ahead

Authors

Abstract

A common criticism of the current Internet is the fact that it does not offers Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees across Autonomous Systems (AS) boundaries. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is central to solve this problem, since it enables ASes to distribute reachability information. However, BGP is agnostic of any performance or QoS metrics. For this reason, the debate about the requirements for the future Inter-domain Routing architecture and about whether these requirements are best met by an approach of introducing changes into BGP or by replacing
BGP is still open. This article provides an insight into the Inter-domain QoS Routing problem. First, the main drawbacks of current Inter-domain routing with regard to the provision of QoS are identified. Second, a survey of the most relevant Inter-domain QoS Routing approaches are described and discussed. We also give a broad perspective on challenges surrounding the issue of whether to extend or replace BGP to support QoS, with particular emphasis on the technical challenges. However, we also point out some non-technical unsolved challenges that in our perspective still be almost certainly the biggest barrier to the development of inter-domain QoS routing.

Keywords

QoS, Routing, Inter-domain QoS Routing, BGP

Subject

Inter-domain QoS Routing

Journal

(To appear in) Annals of Telecommunications, Special Issue on Inter-Domain Routing and QoS over Heterogeneous Networks: Utopia or Reality (Fall 2008), October 2008

PDF File