End to End Network Quality of Service in Grid environments: the QoSINUS approach

Grids rely on a complex interconnection of IP domains that may exhibit changing performance characteristics and may offer different quality of service (QoS) facilities. As lot of distributed applications require controlled communication performance, a Grid Service allowing applications to specify QoS objectives and controlling the realization of these goals in a multi IP domains context is required. This paper presents QoSINUS, a grid network service that dynamically allocates the network resources to packets belonging Grid flows in order to match their individual requirements under different network load conditions. This service aims at increasing the end to end performance of individual applications as well as optimising the grid network resource utilization. To illustrate the principles of the service, we have implemented QoSINUS with the active network technology and interfaced it with a DiffServ network. The QoSINUS proposes a simple API and a collection of independent agents, located at wide area network edges. Results of experiments conducted in the eToile French grid test bed show the validity of this approach.