A State Management Protocol for Intserv, Diiserv and Label Switching

Providing Quality of Service (qos) in an eecient and scalable manner in the Internet is a topic of active research. The technologies that have drawn the most attention are Integrated Services (IntServ), Diierential Services (DiiServ) and Label Switching(mpls). While these technologies are orthogonal in many respects and can coexist, they are all similar with respect to the fact that some or all the routers in such networks need to be programmed with state information associating data ows with qos classes or priorities or labels. This paper describes a protocol called ssp (State Setup Protocol) which is designed to disseminate and manage this state information. In addition to a simple design which makes fast implementations feasible, ssp provides many features like state aggregation and third party signaling which makes ssp a suitable tool for network connguration, management and provisioning as well. A detailed discussion of ssp is presented along with numerous examples and performance measurements.