QOS-POLICY BASED ROUTING IN PUBLIC HETEROGENEOUS BROADBAND NETWORKS QoS-Policy based Routing in Public Heterogeneous Broadband Networks

As telecom providers introduce new and more sophisticated services the necessity of a global, unified view of the network infrastructure becomes demanding. Today, heterogeneous backbone networks are interconnected in order to provide global connectivity. Due to technological impairments the cost of network operation, the maintenance complexity and the overuse of resources are extremely high under the goal of supporting the diverting customer QoS requirements. In order for a network to guarantee customers’ QoS requirements, it should be able to reserve resources and exercise network control functionality at different time-scales. In connection-oriented networks, the transfer of information between two end-users is accomplished by network functions that select and allocate network resources along an acceptable path. Routing is a call-level network control mechanism through which a path is derived for establishing communication between a source and a destination in a network. In this paper we propose a QoS-Policy based routing management architecture appropriate for heterogeneous, multi-domain, multi-technology networks. This architecture is appropriate for inter-network communication between Public Network Operators (PNOs) each of which might support several sub-networks of different technologies. Every autonomous network provider supports a QoS Manager able to manage local network resources and able to interact with the QoS Managers of neighbouring network providers for information exchange and maintenance. The key idea behind the QoS Manager is that it is able to take routing decisions with the sole objective to increase resource utilisation for the network under its supervision while at the same time cooperate with its peers in order to guarantee the end-to-end QoS requirements of the customer requests. According to the customer traffic characteristics and QoS requirements, the QoS Manager is able to find a route to support the connection, that optimises users’ and networks’ profits while satisfying their requirements.