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Researchers: Ngok Lam, Ph.D. Student & Prof. Lorne Mason
Description:
The current Internet architecture is unable to provide end-to-end QoS guarantess for the data in an easy manner. A higher level mechanism on the top of the Internet known as Service Overlay Network (SON) is proposed to alleviate this problem. Because of its special structure, the SON is able to delivery end-to-end QoS guarantees without making any changes to the current Internet Infrastructure.
As the integration of services is taking place in the telecommunication industry, the web
is also gradually evolving from the “version 2.0 era”, which is characterized by content
sharing, to the “version 3.0 era” that emphasizes heavily on live and real time contents
with quality of service (QoS) guarantees expected. This shift of paradigm calls for better
end-to-end QoS supports on the Internet, which poses a major challenge to the current
Internet architecture.
Owning to historical reasons, the structure of the Internet can not provide end-to-end QoS
guarantees in a straight forward way. Even with proposed modifications like the Diffserv
or the Intserv protocols, getting end-to-end QoS guarantees from the current Internet is
still daunting for an end user. The core reason is because the Internet was not designed
with end-to-end QoS guarantees in mind. Though a fundamental change in the Internet
architecture can solve the problem, but this is unrealistic owning to both economic and
political factors. The Service Overlay Network (SON) is a networking architecture that is
capable of tackling this difficulty without the need to make fundamental and acute
changes to the existing Internet infrastructure. It can offer robust end-to-end QoS
guarantees under the current Internet architecture by using overlays on the top of the
physical Internet. It does not interference with the normal operations on the Internet and
is thus an attractive architecture for enabling end-to-end QoS supports on the Internet.
Integrating the SON economically into the current networking infrastructure is a big
challenge to the network operators and their engineers. Designing such a network is
frequently based on two economic philosophies, namely the profit maximization
philosophy, and the cost minimization philosophy. The resulting design problem is
usually hard in a sense that it can not be solved in polynomial time. We shall introduce in
this chapter an efficient approach based on the decomposition of a network Markov
Decision Process to solve the problem.
The aforesaid two design philosophies sometimes yield the same solutions, but in other
times they do not. In the second part of the chapter, we shall investigate the conditions
such that the two design philosophies are equivalent, this result enables a formal study of
the design principles based on the service charges of the SON services. Since the SON is
under the administration of a single operator, it is likely that various routing schemes are
employed by the individual operators to fit their own business objectives, and our result
in this part is general enough to be independent of the actual routing schemes employed.
The result could therefore provide a general guideline for the SON designers.
Publications:
N. Lam, Z. Dziong and L.G. Mason, Enabling End-To-End QoS Guarantees in the Web 3.0 era with Service Overlay Networks, Book Chapter in "Economic Integration: Developlments, Implications and Challenges", Nova, 2009
[Book chapter unavilable for copyright reasons]
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