Architectures and performance evaluation of bandwidth brokers

DiffServ is the basis of contemporary QoS-enabled networks. Setting up DiffServ QoS requires extensive engineering effort in dimensioning and provisioning, especially for adjacent networks under different administrations linked in a “federated” hierarchy. The bandwidth broker is an entity that is responsible for the management of the resources and the QoS service operation in an automated way. In this paper, we present, test and compare 2 different architectures of bandwidth brokers, a centralized one and a distributed one. We also deal with the inter-domain operation of the bandwidth broker in order to perform end to end provisioning. The paper presents the relevant aspects for inter-domain operation of a bandwidth broker and focuses on pathfinding issues. We discuss two models for inter domain routing through bandwidth brokers, analyzing their advantages and comparing them.