Distributed QoS Routing for Backbone Overlay Networks

In recent years, overlay networks have emerged as an attractive alternative for supporting value-added services. Due to the difficulty of supporting end-to-end QoS purely in end-user overlays, backbone overlays for QoS support have been proposed. In this paper, we describe a backbone QoS overlay network architecture for scalable, efficient and practical QoS support. In this architecture, we advocate the notion of QoS overlay network (referred to as QSON) as the backbone service domain. The design of QSON relies on well-defined business relationships between the QSON provider, network service providers and end users. A key challenge in making QSON a reality consists of efficiently determining routes for end user QoS flows based on the service level agreements between the QSON provider and network service providers. In this paper, we propose and present a scalable and distributed QoS routing scheme that can be used to efficiently route end user QoS flows through QSON. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution through simulations.