A platform-independent API for quality of service management

The differentiated services approach to QoS in the Internet poses new challenges on the configuration and service provisioning side. The approach relies on an entity often referred to as a bandwidth broker. It configures the network elements so that guaranteed networking services are provided to customers. However, the DiffServ capable routers have a large variety of hardware configurations and different configuration interfaces (e.g. SNMP, CORBA, CLI). Therefore, we propose a QoS management API which is used by bandwidth broker implementations in order to configure the underlying routers. In our prototype we implemented a proprietary configuration interface to our Linux-based DiffServ router implementation.