Chameleon: an Architecture for Advanced End to End Services

Current Internet is not able to deploy advanced end-to-end services to support new applications, like interactive multimedia. The best effort service, supported by the Internet, does not offer Quality of Service (QoS) performance guarantees to these applications. Although technology for providing QoS-based services inside domains (networks) is available, the challenge is how domains should interconnect to each other in order to deploy such services in an end-to-end fashion, i.e., crossing domain borders. This paper presents the Chameleon Architecture, which enables the delivery of advanced end-to-end services without being affected by the number of domains involved and the underlying QoS technology that they use. A hierarchical model for service negotiation is proposed, which is compared, via a simulation study, with the traditional bilateral (cascade) model, most commonly used today for relationships between domains. Key-works : quality of service (QoS), service negotiation, resource provisioning.