Bandwidth broker signaling for service level negotiation over heterogeneous IPv4/IPv6 diffserv networks

The Differentiated Services (DiffServ) is a Quality of Service (QoS) architecture developed by IETF. The basic assumption of this architecture is to achieve scalability in the core. A limited number of services provided by the network and a simplified architecture of the core nodes are key factors of DiffServ network scalability. At interdomain boundaries, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) specify the transit service to be given to each aggregate. In general, SLAs are complex business-related Contracts that cover a wide range of issues, including network availability guarantees, payment models, and other legal and business necessities. Bandwidth Broker (BB) is responsible for ensuring that resources within the DiffServ domain and on links connecting adjacent domains are properly provisioned and not oversubscribed. The BB is conceptually a policy management entity located in a policy-enabled domain. It negotiates SLAs with neighboring domains and ensures compliance of the administered domain with the SLAs contracted, We have defined and implemented a new interdomain protocol (a modification of COPS-SLS for the support of DifiServ over IPv4/IPv6 networks) called a BB-SLS as a service level negotiation protocol. And also, a testbed implementation of the proposed solutions is finally described.