IP Services Research Articles

Design and Architectural Concepts for Border Model Based IP/Optical Multi-Layer Service Networks

The bandwidth explosion ushered in by the popularity of the Internet has spurred the recent acceleration in the development and deployment of equipment supporting packet based broadband services. This coupled with the widespread deployment of WDM based Optical Transport Systems in the core network to satisfy the corresponding increase in capacity demand, has led network planners for tighter coordination between IP and Optical layers to increase reliability, robustness of next generation backbone network. In this paper, we propose a solution known as border model, which is tailored to address deployment concerns associated with GMPLS technology in existing networks. We extend our proposal to include, Border model based Multi-layer service network architecture, to provide coordinated multi-layer IP and Optical services, for different network design scenarios. Resource Control is an important aspect of multi-layer service networks. This paper examines next generation requirements for resource control, defines resource control architecture and presents some evaluation results for multi-layer recovery techniques in the context of Multi-layer service network based on border model.

Virtual network approach to scalable IP service deployment and efficient resource management

As the Internet evolves into a global all-service communication infrastructure, a key consideration is providing quality of service guarantees over IP with efficient resource utilization in a scalable, flexible, and automatic way. In this article we present a virtual network (VN) based architecture for scalable IP service deployment and efficient network resource management. Particularly considering a DiffServ/MPLS III transport network supporting multiple VNs, we propose a dynamic approach for efficient bandwidth sharing among VNs. The bandwidth sharing is service-level-agreement-based; the spare capacity in underloaded VNs is adaptively and efficiently utilized, and SLA compliance for all the VNs involved is always guaranteed.

IP resilience within an autonomous system: current approaches, challenges, and future directions

Network survivability is gaining increasing attention from the Internet research community. The ubiquity of IP services has fueled increasing interest in ensuring their dependability, by making IP networks more disruption-tolerant. After providing a brief overview of how routing is accomplished in the Internet, this article reviews how the protocols react to failures or changes in network state within an autonomous system. The problems associated with current restoration schemes, with respect to newer and more stringent requirements posed by emerging services such as voice over IP, are identified. We present an overview of the schemes proposed to ameliorate fault recovery and critique their contributions. We also outline future research directions for improving IP resilience.

New access scheme for VoIP packets in ieee 802.11e wireless LANs

We propose a new multiple access scheme to support Voice over IP (VoIP) service in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs, in which the transmission of data packets is prevented by energy bursts sent by VoIP stations and the VoIP packets do not collide each other by using a unique voice user's ID (VID).

Voice-Quality Monitoring and Control for VoIP

Voice over IP offers important opportunities for the telecommunications market to deploy more advanced services, but it must overcome many obstacles. Users expect toll-quality voice, which calls for end-to-end quality of service (QoS) - a challenge for IP service providers. To make VoIP attractive to end users, the only feasible and directly implementable alternative is to deploy an efficient mechanism within the endpoints. To that end, the authors propose the scalable, modular, call quality monitoring and control framework for maintaining voice quality at acceptable levels over networks that don't offer QoS guarantees.

Route to profitable European PATLIB centres with a process orientated business model in intellectual property services

Patent information centres in Europe (PATLIB) have to reorganise their business model because of the changing market situation for information services in Europe. It is shown, that the present approach only covers a small segment of the information service market and results in low accessible market volumes for PATLIB centres. Furthermore free-of-charge web-based patent information tends to result in difficulties to achieve cost covering prices for PATLIB services. The future PATLIB market situation can be summarised as expecting danger of reduced economic viability. Based on the specific PATLIB centre characteristics a redesign of business model is described. To generate a profitable future perspective it is necessary to focus on customer relationship marketing (CRM) for the main customer, respectively the business potential of small and medium enterprise (SME) environment. Six steps are proposed for the reorganisation into IP service centres. The first two steps are the orientation along the SME-customers IP value chain and a process oriented marketing approach. The next two steps are basic business models to meet the new process orientation. Finally the necessity and the arrangement of a tight European service network to offer top quality customer services and redesigned marketing activities is described.

Voice evolution

This paper explores the future of voice in BT, in terms of market drivers, technology solutions and simple economics. It considers the overall market for voice services in the UK and the directional conclusions which may be drawn. The pressures on the current PSTN platform are explored along with potential solutions to these issues. The paper then goes on to review voice over IP services which range from best-effort, Internet-based through to high-quality corporate services, and provides a perspective on the market for these services, together with their technical maturity. The paper then reviews the opportunities provided by multimedia calling, and explores how these services can be delivered. Taking these areas as a whole, it then proposes a flexible architecture which can be used to deliver all of these services in the context of an uncertain future market-place, providing the flexibility required to mitigate against the uncertainties in both the current and future market environments.

Voice Over IP services: Regulatory perspectives from the developed and the developing worlds

As the technology for Internet telephone service (“Voice Over IP” or “VOIP”) matures, and the quality of service improves, regulators in developed and developing countries are encountering significant and very different regulatory challenges. This article looks at the issues faced by regulators in developed country markets with a history of extensive service competition. A follow-up article will contrast the issues faced in developing country markets, particularly those where service competition is limited.

Evaluation of AASHTO SiteManager Performance on High-Latency Satellite Communication Links

Most transportation agencies and departments have deployed transmission control protocol–Internet protocol (TCP-IP) applications in their offices and are beginning to deploy TCP-IP applications in remote or satellite field offices. Deployment of TCP-IP applications where broadband access is not available can be quite challenging. Satellite-based communication offers an opportunity to provide high-bandwidth connections quickly. However, satellite communications incur significant travel time delay that may result in poor performance of applications designed for a low-latency environment. This paper presents an evaluation of the AASHTO SiteManager software suite with two different satellite broadband providers. SiteManager clients performed poorly in the high-latency environment, in some cases up to 50 times slower than with SiteManager running on a low-latency terrestrial network with equivalent bandwidth. In general, the performance of SiteManager was relatively insensitive to the bandwidth provided by the satellite provider. In most tasks, SiteManager performed better over a 50-kbps dial-up connection than over a 384-kbps satellite connection. In an alternative architecture in which SiteManager was operated remotely via a terminal emulation service over a satellite connection, the performance was observed to be robust. This architecture requires considerably more equipment, software, and technical support. Furthermore, the delay in seeing some key-strokes and cursor movements appear can be somewhat awkward for the user. However, given the extensive bursts of short messages between SiteManager clients and the server, the high-latency constraints of a satellite network make a terminal emulation procedure the only viable method of deploying SiteManager via a commercial satellite IP service.

Multi-wavelength switching in IP optical nodes adopting different buffering strategies

The paper addresses the topic of long-haul optical networking for the provision of large-bandwidth IP services. A class of optical packet switching architectures is considered which adopts an arrayed wavelength grating device as packet router. The architecture performs slotted packet switching operations and fully exploits the wavelength routing capabilities by allowing multi-wavelength switching. Fiber delay lines are used to perform optical packet buffering, which accomplishes either input queueing or shared queueing. Here a thorough performance evaluation is carried out with different buffering configurations and the effect of various switch parameters on traffic performance is studied.

An IPv6 enabled packet engine design for home/SOHO routers

Due to the diversity of internet applications and services, traditional software-based networking devices may not be sufficient to afford the processing load imposed by the services. One example is the mixed-version IP environment in which routers must handle the IPv4/IPv6 translation while keeping the IP processing at the line speed. In this paper, we present our work for the design of a protocol optimised packet processing engine that provides common IP services and mixed-version translations. This silicon is written in VHDL and is tested in a Xilinx Vertex II FPGA development board.

On the building blocks of quality of service in heterogeneous IP networks

After more than a decade of active research on Quality of Service in IP networks and the Internet, the majority of IP traffic relies on the conventional best-effort IP service model. Nevertheless, some QoS mechanisms are deployed in current networking infrastructures, while emerging applications pose QoS challenges. This survey brings into the foreground a broad range of research results on Quality of Service in IP-based networks. First, a justification of the need for QoS is provided, along with challenges stemming from the convergence of IP and wireless networks and the proliferation of QoS-demanding IP applications (such as VoIP). It is also emphasized that a global uniform end-to-end IP QoS solution is not realistic. Based on this remark, packet-level QoS mechanisms are classified as certain building blocks, each one fulfilling different objectives in certain parts of a heterogeneous IP network. This taxonomy, being in line with the ITU-T initiative toward a QoS architectural framework for IP networks, gives rise to a thorough presentation of QoS “building blocks,” as well as their associated mechanisms. This presentation is followed by an illustration of how the various building blocks are combined in the scope of modern IP networks. However, offering QoS in a large scale IP-based network demands that additional (i.e. non-packet-level) QoS mechanisms are deployed in some parts. Therefore, we also present prominent technologies and mechanisms devised to augment the QoS capabilities of access, wireless, and optical networks. We illustrate how these mechanisms boost end-to-end QoS solutions and reveal interworking issues with packet-level mechanisms.

Bandwidth on demand for deployed-IP users

The increased expectation for instantaneous, global communications is at odds with the existence of areas that have little or no communications infrastructure. Telephones and their supporting ground-based systems are not as ubiquitous as first-world enterprises might believe. Cell phones require some minimal number of support systems, whether ground or satellite based. Even in areas that have a considerable communications infrastructure, consider what would happen if disaster struck, as it unfortunately did in Sumatra and Indonesia in late December 2004. Restoring communications might require a quickly deployable, temporary communications system. In these situations, commercial satellite communications (satcom) has some unique advantages. With the advent of IP services characterized by short messages such as Internet packets, satcom transmission technologies such as MF TDMA provide a very effective means of quickly deploying a communications infrastructure. The bandwidth-on-demand concept uses the dynamic and flexible allocation of bandwidth across a range of frequencies and a large pool of timeslots. This is the most advanced step toward the nirvana of transmissions at any time across any and all frequencies. Commercial satcom is already beginning to provide direct TV and IP capability into planes, trains, buses, ships, and automobiles. A move to ultra-small satcom terminals for the busy executive is on the horizon. This would be one suitcase-sized package with easy setup, permitting a user to quickly go on the air. In the future, commercial satcom might use other techniques-such as bandwidth reuse, spread spectrum, multifrequency, and echo cancellation - for greater efficiency.

Deploying diffserv in backbone networks for tight SLA control

The differentiated services architecture (Diffserv) enables service providers to offer tighter, more comprehensive service-level agreements (SLAs) for IP service performance. One way it does this is by letting designers engineer IP backbone networks to assure that SLA parameters are met on a per-class basis. This review covers best practices for designing, validating, deploying, and operating Diffserv in the network backbone. It also presents new results from router-based testing that demonstrate how, with Diffserv, high-performance backbone routers can achieve tight SLA capabilities.

Techno-economic evaluation of broadband access alternatives for ip services

This paper deals with a techno - economic evaluation of broadband upgrade strategy for IP services. This scenario is focused on the FTTcab/VDSL architecture with ATM versus Ethernet approaches. Target market is residential customers and small business customers in urban and dense urban areas. Installed First Cost (IFC) and Net present Value (NPV) as main techno - economic results are discussed regarding common assumptions. The results show that the choice of technology (Ethernet or ATM) has almost no effect on the cost level and profitability of the cases.

Assessing the scalability of component-based frameworks

This paper proposes an approach to scalability analysis of component-based systems. A theoretical model of the orchestrated behavior of a system's components is developed and potential bottlenecks are identified. The model is derived by performing an analysis of the average number of messages that each involved entity has to deal with, i.e. receive, elaborate and possibly forward. By appropriately setting the various model parameters, it is possible to evaluate a system's behavior in a number of different scenarios. The model itself is based upon a queuing network paradigm, whereby each component is associated with a "service centre" characterized by specific values of both the message arrival rate and the service time: based on such values, the utilization coefficient of the service centers is computed and the potential bottlenecks are identified. The queuing network model is also exploited to evaluate the performance of the overall system under various configurations. The proposed approach is introduced and developed by taking the CADENUS system as a running example. CADENUS is a component-based framework designed and developed within a recent IST project, whose main goal resides in the provisioning of Premium IP services by means of an effective application of the so-called mediation paradigm.

Empowering innovation: extending services regionally

An outline is provided of the practical assistance and support being given to innovators and entrepreneurs in the North-West of England by Technet North-West, a project funded by North-West Development Agency and the European Regional Development Fund. The article shows the benefits and service improvements achieved through partnership and collaboration. Identifying successful models, such as the Manchester patent clinic, and rolling them out into the region, ensures the sharing of best practice. Establishing inventors’ information points as satellites to Manchester PATLIB provides a local base for inventors, gives a higher profile for IP services and also enables the growth of a network of business support agencies. Technet-NW thus helps inventors and innovative businesses to get their idea from concept to marketplace by putting them in touch with the relevant support agency at the right time in the innovation cycle.

A QoS Index for IP Services to Effectively Support Usage-Based Charging

The goal of this letter is to present a model to compute a quality-of-service (QoS) index to characterize IP services. Then, we show how such a score may be used in a clear and flexible way for defining advanced usage-based tariff criteria to charge QoS guaranteed network services to address the dynamics of the expected future telecommunications scenario.

Packets in peril [voice over IP security issues

Finally, after a number of false starts and much scepticism from the telecommunications establishment, voice over IP (VoIP) services are finally starting to take off in many countries around the world. However, as the VoIP wave begins to swell, with significant amounts of traffic migrating from traditional public networks onto this new technology, questions about its security and reliability are starting to arise, both from users and governments. This article first examines the various VoIP services available and then outlines the security threats to them along with measures to counteract there threats.

Policy-based dynamic provision of IP services in a secure VPN coalition scenario

This article describes a recent R&D result in supporting secure and dynamic coalition internetworking scenarios, where a number of military and civil subnetworks are combined using IPsec in a higher-level IP secure military network. It is part of the work undertaken in the VPN workshop initiative, where a set of national defense and research organizations are meeting together to align their vision and requirements on what an IPv4 or IPv6 secure and dynamic IPsec-based virtual private network should be, and how to deploy it in an international multidomain scenario.