ENICOM's bandwidth broker

There is enormous potential for the growth of the Internet if businesses are able to use it for their mission-critical applications, but these applications can use the Internet only if it provides QoS (quality of service) assurance. Recently, the differentiated services (DiffServ) architecture has been proposed to provide guaranteed QoS on the Internet, and it is said to be more scalable than the earlier integrated services (IntServ) model. DiffServ ensures guaranteed QoS on only a hop-by-hop or edge-to-edge basis. To provide an end-to-end guarantee in DiffServ, a bandwidth broker (BB) framework has been proposed to perform admission control over DiffServ domains. In 1999, an initiative was undertaken by CKP/NGI (Cyber Kansai Project/Next-Generation Internet) to provide a guarantee of end-to-end QoS for business contents over the Internet using a premium service [using the EF (expedited forwarding) PHB (per-hop behavior) of DiffServ]. As part of this initiative, ENICOM (Nippon Steel Information & Communication System Inc.) developed a BB and tested it on an experimental WAN in Japan. Since its creation, this BB has been continuously modified and enhanced to accommodate more services and standards. First, this paper provides a report of our BB, its implementation and deployment experience. Then we propose modifications in our design to incorporate recently proposed standards. We also describe experiments and simulations which have been performed and those that are in the pipeline.