Inter-Domain Traffic Engineering on a Bandwidth Broker Supported Diffserv Internet

In this paper, we are proposing an Inter-domain traffic engineering architecture over a Bandwidth Broker (BB) supported Diffserv internet. The main components of our architecture are a novel inter-domain QoS routing architecture, the addition of an explicit path setup capability to the Simple Inter-domain Bandwidth Broker Signaling (SIBBS) protocol, and inter-domain label switched path (LSP) setup. The inter-domain QoS routing protocol is used to find an inter-domain path that satisfies the requested QoS parameters for a certain connection. Bandwidth Brokers are used to set up the intra-domain and inter-domain paths between the source and the destination domains. The SIBBS protocol is used to communicate the explicit path information and the QoS information between bandwidth brokers, which are responsible for the domains that are on the QoS path found by the QoS routing protocol. Inter-domain path setup is achieved by using interdomain label switched paths. 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. Our traffic engineering architecture can also be used to balance the load on outgoing links of a domain. If a robust pricing scheme is applied to the Internet, our architecture can also provide cost balancing.