Provisioning QoS in Inter-domain Traffic Engineering

This work describes an architectural framework that allows inter-domain Traffic Engineering Label Switched Paths (TE-LSPs) with guaranteed quality of service (QoS) to be setup. Such TE-LSPs, called EQ-links, are setup by coordinating path computation elements (PCEs) of neighboring autonomous systems (ASs) along a pre-determined inter-AS path, computed through cooperative interaction between pairs of neighboring ASs. After defining the architectural requirements for the framework, we describe and analyze the Inter-AS Path Computation Protocol (IA-PCP), which computes an interdomain path at the AS level, i.e., selecting a sequence of ASs to the destination, based on a loose source routing approach. The results of the IA-PCP computations are then fed to the PCEs for complete path computation. The proposed architecture has been actually implemented within the testbed of the EuQoS project, which is aimed at enabling end-to-end QoS in the Internet. We report results related to the setup time of EQ-links, measured in the pan-European testbed of the EuQoS project, showing that path computation and setup takes an affordable time overhead.