Inter-Domain Traffic Engineering on Diffserv Networks: A Region-based Approach

In this paper, we are proposing an Inter-domain traffic engineering architecture over Differentiated Services (Diffserv) networks. Our architecture uses an inter-domain Quality of Service (QoS) routing architecture, an inter-domain QoS signaling protocol, and an inter-domain path establishment method. We briefly present the inter-domain QoS routing protocol that is used to find an inter-domain path, which satisfies the requested QoS parameters for a certain connection. As an inter-domain QoS signaling protocol we present the SIBBS-TE protocol, which is used to communicate the explicit path information and the QoS information between Bandwidth Brokers that are responsible for the domains on the QoS path found by the QoS routing protocol. SIBBS-TE is extended from the SIBBS protocol by adding explicit path setup capability, and inter-domain label exchange capability. Inter-domain path setup is achieved by using inter-domain label switched paths (LSP). Path setup is also used to verify that the path found by the inter-domain QoS routing protocol indeed satisfies the requested QoS parameters. We restricted our investigation to inter-domain traffic engineering; we do not explore intra-domain issues. Simulation of our inter-domain traffic engineering architecture shows that our approach improves throughput by shifting QoS traffic away from congested links.