Report of Quality of Service Think Tank

UKERNA manages the networking programme on behalf of the higher and further education and research community in the United Kingdom. JANET, the United Kingdom's academic and research network, is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Copyright: This document is copyright The JNT Association trading as UKERNA. Parts of it, as appropriate, may be freely copied and incorporated unaltered into another document unless produced for commercial gain, subject to the source being appropriately acknowledged and the copyright preserved. The reproduction of logos without permission is expressly forbidden. Permission should be sought from JANET Customer Service. Disclaimer: The information contained herein is believed to be correct at the time of issue, but no liability can be accepted for any inaccuracies. The reader is reminded that changes may have taken place since issue, particularly in rapidly changing areas such as internet addressing, and consequently URLs and e-mail addresses should be used with caution. The JNT Association cannot accept any responsibility for any loss or damage resulting from the use of the material contained herein. This report addresses the issues of how to introduce Quality of Service support into SuperJANET4 in order to support services sensitive to network delay and jitter. It also considers the related question of introducing traffic engineering support both for certain of these applications and for requirements associated with specific programmes in the UK Research and Higher and Further Education sectors. The report is divided into five sections, the first of which serves to introduce the general nature of the requirement, the method of working adopted by the Think Tank, and its Terms of Reference (annexed to this report). Section 2 surveys the requirements identified by the Think Tank in consultation with the three sectors above. They cover videoconferencing and videocasting, voice over IP, GRID and e-Science, issues associated with the need to extend JANET services beyond the conventional workplace, and issues arising from the closing of the Managed Bandwidth Service formerly made available over the SuperJANET3 ATM infrastructure. Section 3 provides a review of technologies available for QoS and traffic engineering support. In respect of QoS support, the Differentiated Services technology is proposed as the basis for initial deployment of QoS support, primarily on the grounds of avoiding potential scaling problems in the network core, and also because it is not predicated upon deployment of support for signalling in end-user systems. Multi-Protocol Label Switching is recommended as …