Implementation of a Bandwidth Broker for Dynamic End-to-End Resource Reservation in Outsourced Virtual Private Networks

As today’s network infrastructure continues to grow and Differentiated Services IP backbones are now available to provide various levels of quality of service (QoS) to VPN traffic, the ability to manage increasing network complexity is considered as a crucial factor for QoS enabled VPN solutions. There is growing trend by corporate customers to outsource such complicated management services to Internet Service Providers (ISP) not only to avoid the complexities of VPN establishment and management, but also for economic reasons. In this paper, we present methods to provide end-to-end capacity allocation to VPN connections in a single ISP domain and show the implementation of a Bandwidth Broker managing the outsourced VPNs for corporate customers that have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with their ISPs. We also present practical configuration examples of commercial routers for enabling QoS enabled VPN tunnels and show how the Bandwidth Broker can dynamically establish tunnels when users send connection requests from the WWW interface.