The Virtual Topology Service: A Mechanism for QoS-Enabled Interdomain Routing

In this paper we present the Virtual Topology Service (VTS), a new approach to provide interdomain services taking into account QoS and Traffic Engineering (TE) constraints. It is known that in these days the provisioning of end-to-end interdomain connections does not consider any type of QoS due to limitations of the BGP routing protocol. At the same time, many extensions have been proposed to BGP, however none of them were put into practice. We advocate in favor of a service layer that offers new mechanisms for interdomain routing without affecting the underlying Internet infrastructure. The VTS abstracts the physical network details of each Autonomous System (AS) and is totally integrated with BGP. We use the Internet hierarchy to obtain more alternative routes towards a destination. The architecture was already used to provide interdomain services in optical networks. In this paper we show how the architecture can be used to provide interdomain connections in IP networks. We will show how the VTS and other services such as the end-to-end negotiation service work together to provide a complete mechanism for provisioning of interdomain QoS-enabled routes. Preliminary evaluation results are also presented.