Design and Implementation of Inter-ISP Virtual Backbone Infrastructure to Meet Various QoS Requirements

The variety of Quality of Service (QoS) requirements from applications is increasing and overlay networks are spreading widely. Because of this, a means of flexibly supporting various applications, including overlay network applications, must be devised. In this paper, we describe an inter-ISP virtual backbone infrastructure designed to flexibly meet various QoS requirements. In our infrastructure, we use "overlay routers" which are deployed by ISPs. The overlay routers manage virtual backbones, which provide an overlay network for particular applications, and relay application traffic to the virtual backbones. We have implemented a set of prototypes, including the overlay router and sample client programs, to test the infrastructure's feasibility and fundamental performance. We qualitatively compare our infrastructure with Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) and describe some remaining technical challenges.