Adaptive End-to-End Quality-of-Service Guarantees in IP Networks using an Active Networking Approach

This paper proposes a framework based on an active networking approach to efficiently link Quality-of-Service (QoS) descriptions from an application point of view with an underlying heterogeneous IP networking infrastructure. The main goal is to provide building blocks that cooperate to sense the availability of and deploy distinct QoS capabilities in order to accomplish adaptive end-to-end service guarantees. The building blocks needed in a heterogeneous IP network will be introduced and discussed with respect to safety from abuse of total networking bandwidth, CPU, and memory usage. In conjunction with a new safety hierarchy and a sandbox environment for active-code execution, security risks can be bounded to the level of traditional IP forwarding, control, and management. In particular, the problem of QoSparameter translation to provide end-to-end service guarantees is addressed, and an example using Diffserv, RSVP, and GPRS in a heterogeneous network is given.