Strategies for Provisioning End-to-End QoS-based Services in a Multi-Domain Scenario

Providing end-to-end performance guarantees for QoS-based services, such as interactive voice and video, is a challenging task in the current Internet. In most cases, it involves the cooperation of multiple administrative domains, for the correct resource provisioning along the end-to-end path. Although some QoS standards have emerged in the last years, together with a trend for covering Internet services with performance guarantees through a SLA, endto-end QoS provisioning remains presently an open research problem. The main reason, advocated by this paper, is the current domain interconnection structure, which does not provide enough financial incentives for QoS deployment. In this paper, we tackle the interconnection problem by giving special attention to interdomain dynamic service negotiation, which is an important step that must be considered prior to the physical resource provisioning. Three strategies for ISP interaction (called negotiation models) are presented and evaluated through simulation and analysis.