Advertising interdomain QoS routing information

Abstract

To enable end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees in the Internet, based on the border gateway protocol (BGP), interdomain QoS information advertising, and routing are important. However, little research has been done in this area so far. Two major challenges, scalability and heterogeneity, make the QoS extension to BGP difficult. In the existing routing schemes, static and instantaneous QoS metrics, such as link capacity and available bandwidth, are used to represent QoS routing information, but neither of them can solve the two challenges well. In this paper, BGP is extended to advertise available bandwidth and delay information of routes, but, instead of using the traditional deterministic metrics, a series of statistical metrics, available bandwidth index (ABI), delay index (DI), available bandwidth histogram (ABH), and delay histogram (DH), are defined and applied to QoS information advertising and routing. Two major contributions of the proposed statistical metrics are: 1) QoS information is abstracted into one or several probability intervals and, thus, the heterogeneous and dynamic QoS information can be represented more flexibly and precisely and 2) by capturing the statistical property of the detailed distribution of QoS information, these new metrics are efficient and they can highly decrease the message overhead in routing, thereby making the QoS advertising and routing scalable. Our extensive simulations confirm both contributions of the QoS extension to BGP very well. Moreover, besides BGP, these statistical metrics can be applied to other networks and protocols to represent QoS information in a more scalable and precise way.