QoS-Ensured Network Resource Federation Driven by Bandwidth Brokers in Open Access Network Architecture

Abstract

Various network services, such as virtual private network, cloud computing and Internet protocol television, are often provided across multiple network operators. The difficulty in managing the quality of service across multiple operator domains is the barrier to adoption especially to service level agreement-sensitive and mission critical cases. Federating network resources among operators is necessary to manage the quality of service across operators. To manage network resources of other operator domains, the network operator's federation mechanisms aiming at a future open access network model are essential. In this paper, the mechanisms of the signaling process as well as the capability of the bandwidth broker are proposed for open access networking, where multiple operators are connected via a common access network operator. Considering that both the next generation network and the non-next generation network architectures must coexist, we have analyzed federation mechanisms for establishing practical functional extensions to existing bandwidth broker implementations for the federation signaling. Based on the analysis, the designs of the federation signaling and the required bandwidth broker functional models are proposed. The proposed design is prototyped and the demonstration of the federation signaling shows that the federation mechanism can assure the bandwidth of a targeted live data stream on demand across the trunk and the access network operators even under a congested situation.