A hierarchical multilayer QoS routing system with dynamic SLA management

This paper proposes a hierarchical multilayer QoS routing system with dynamic SLA management for large-scale IP networks. Previously, the promising approach to provide QoS in large-scale IP networks using a mixture of DiffServ-based QoS management and MPLS-based traffic engineering has been actively discussed. However, the introduction of QoS exacerbates the already existing scalability problems of the standard IP routing protocols. In order to address this issue, we propose a new scalable routing framework based on hierarchical QoS-aware path computation. We augment the existing OSPF and CR-LDP protocols to support hierarchical QoS routing, QoS aggregation, and QoS reservation in our MPLS-DiffServ-based hierarchical routing network. In order to provide additional flexibility and cost-efficiency, we augment the network with a policy server which is capable of dynamically handling SLAs between the networks and providing load balancing management within the network. We implement a prototype of the proposed framework and study its performance with a virtual network simulator and specially designed QoS routing algorithm simulator. In our simulations, we evaluate both the implementation complexity and algorithms performance; the results demonstrate the efficiency of the framework and its advantages over the existing proposals.