A state management protocol for IntServ, DiffServ and label switching

Providing quality of service (QoS) in an efficient and scalable manner in the Internet is a topic of active research. The technologies that have drawn the most attention are integrated services (IntServ), differential services (DiffServ) and label switching (MPLS). While these technologies are orthogonal in many respects and can coexist, they are all similar with respect to the fact that some or all the routers in such networks need to be programmed with state information associating data flows with QoS classes or priorities or labels. This paper describes a protocol called SSP (state setup protocol) which is designed to disseminate and manage this state information. In addition to a simple design which makes fast implementations feasible, SSP provides many features like state aggregation and third party signaling which makes SSP a suitable tool for network configuration, management and provisioning as well. A detailed discussion of SSP is presented along with numerous examples and performance measurements.