Multi-domain End-to-End (E2E) Routing with Multiple QoS Parameters - Considering Real World User Requirements and Service Provider Constraints

The growing amount of international collaborations in research, education, and business fields has raised once again the demand for quality assurance of network connections, which the projects and applications are realized upon. A large spectrum of examples with diverse requirements is found in areas such as \emph{GRID} and \emph{cloud computing}, eLearning, video on demand, and video-conferencing. The consequences of these diverse project and application requirements culminate in the urgent necessity to provide an End-to-End (E2E) guarantee for any user-tailored combination of service-specific Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. The quality of the overall network connections provided to users directly depends on the quality of the involved connection parts. This means that already during the routing process the quality of available connection parts has to be considered. Especially for international connections it is common that multiple service providers (SPs) realize different connection segments. At the same time the inter-domain routing is driven mostly by the combination of business interests and restrictive information policies. This means that during the routing not only the optimality of the available connection parts has to be considered, but also the preferences and restrictions of the involved provider domains. In this paper, we present an inter-domain routing algorithm for distinguishing the E2E route for dedicated point-to-point connections. The proposed algorithm considers both the E2E user requirements for service quality and the service provider constraints. The proposed algorithm is not restricted to consider a sole quality parameter and can therefore be used for the establishment of connections with the user-tailored combination of connection properties, including service quality as well as connection management functionality.