A connection-oriented network architecture with guaranteed QoS for future real-time applications over the Internet

Abstract

The QoS provided by today’s best effort Internet is not good enough, especially for real-time interactive traffic categorized as Premium Traffic (PT). It is believed that QoS guarantees could be better provided by connection-oriented networks such as IP/MPLS. However, these connection-oriented networks are inherently more prone to network failures. Failures of connection-oriented MPLS can be broadly classified into two types namely: link/path failures and degraded failures. Degraded failures that account for about 50% of total failures are detected by the timers maintained at the control plane peers. The control plane and the data plane of IP/MPLS packet networks are logically separated and therefore a failure in the control plane should not immediately disconnect the communications in the data plane. The Virtual Path Hopping (VPH) concept in this study distinguishes these two types of failures and avoids the disconnections of communications in the data plane due to degraded failures. Thereby it reduces the number of failures in the data plane. Computer simulations were performed and the results indicate that VPH is a proactive technique that minimizes failures in the data plane. The proposed Dynamic Virtual Path Allocation (DVPA) algorithm improves the availability of the connection-oriented networks by overcoming link/path failures, especially for PT, without compromising the network resource utilization efficiency. Comprehensive simulations were performed to evaluate the DVPA algorithm and the results show the improvements that DVPA can achieve. Therefore implementation of the DVPA algorithm in conjunction with VPH would improve the reliability and availability aspects of QoS in connection-oriented IP/MPLS packet networks.