Towards Integrated Provisioning of QoS Overlay Networks

The Internet is one of the most successful technologies in last century. Within less than four decades (starting from the first packet-switched computer network, ARPAnet), it has evolved into an extremely popular commercial infrastructure, and has a significant impact on almost all aspects of our lives and our society. With the dramatic advances in multimedia technologies and the increasing popularity of real-time applications, recently, quality of service (QoS) support in the Internet has been in a great demand. However, due to many historical reasons, today’s Internet primarily provides best-effort connectivity service. To enhance the best-effort service model to provide QoS, researchers have proposed many seminal architectures, represented by IntServ [26] and DiffServ [25]. Unfortunately, due to many critical factors, realizing these QoS architectures in the Internet is unlikely to be feasible in the long run. In addition, there are no right economic models for these proposed architectures: although some ISPs might be interested in providing QoS in their own domains, there are no strong incentives for them to support QoS for users in other domains which are not their customers. Then, a challenging question faced by the researchers in the community is: what would be a practical solution for QoS support in the Internet? In the past few years, overlay networks have emerged as an alternative mechanism for supporting valueadded services such as fault tolerance [9], multicasting [38], and security [72]. Many of these overlays are end-user overlays, namely, overlays are constructed purely among the end hosts without support from any other intermediate nodes. Due to the difficulties of supporting end-to-end QoS purely in end-user overlays, some recent works [47, 58, 92, 144] propose to use backbone overlays for QoS support, where overlays are managed by a third party provider, such as an ISP. In this project, we adopt the approach of backbone overlays, and propose an integrated QoS overlay architecture, referred to as IQORA, for scalable, efficient, and practical QoS support. In IQORA, we advocate the notion of a QoS overlay network (referred to as QSON) as the backbone service domain. A QSON consists of service nodes or proxies, which are strategically deployed by a QSON provider (or a higher tier ISP). The design of QSON relies on well-defined business relationships between the QSON provider, network service providers (i.e., the underlying network domains which we also refer to as lower tier ISPs, or underlying ISPs for short), and end users: the QSON provider dimensions its overlay network according to end user requests, purchases bandwidth from the network service providers based on their service level agreements (SLAs), and sells its QoS services to end users via