A two-tier resource management model for the Internet

In this paper we propose a two-tier resource management model for the global Internet. Our solution resembles the current two-tier routing hierarchy and allows individual administrative domains to independently make their own decisions on strategies and protocols to use for internal resource management and QoS support. The aggregate traffic crossing domain borders is served according to relatively stable, long-lived bilateral agreements. End-to-end QoS support is achieved through the concatenation of such bilateral agreements. We describe in detail a realization of this two-tier model, where a bandwidth broker (BB) acts as the resource manager for each administrative domain, neighboring bandwidth brokers communicate with each other to establish inter-domain resource agreements. As an illustrative example in this paper we used a simplified RSVP as an intradomain resource allocation protocol for the aggregate traffic between border routers. Our simulation results show that this two-tier design can provide effective end-to-end QoS support for user applications.