Next Steps for the IP QoS Architecture

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This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

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Copyright © The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

While there has been significant progress in the definition of Quality of Service (QoS) architectures for internet networks, there are a number of aspects of QoS that appear to need further elaboration as they relate to translating a set of tools into a coherent platform for end-to-end service delivery. This document highlights the outstanding architectural issues relating to the deployment and use of QoS mechanisms within internet networks, noting those areas where further standards work may assist with the deployment of QoS internets.

This document is the outcome of a collaborative exercise on the part of the Internet Architecture Board.

Table of Contents

    1. Introduction ...........................................   2
    2. State and Stateless QoS ................................   4
    3. Next Steps for QoS Architectures .......................   6
       3.1 QoS-Enabled Applications ...........................   7
       3.2 The Service Environment ............................   9
       3.3 QoS Discovery ......................................  10
       3.4 QoS Routing and Resource Management ................  10
       3.5 TCP and QoS ........................................  11
       3.6 Per-Flow States and Per-Packet classifiers .........  13
       3.7 The Service Set ....................................  14
       3.8 Measuring Service Delivery .........................  14
       3.9 QoS Accounting .....................................  15
       3.10 QoS Deployment Diversity ..........................  16
       3.11 QoS Inter-Domain signaling ........................  17
   
       3.12 QoS Deployment Logistics ..........................  17
    4. The objective of the QoS architecture ..................  18
    5. Towards an end-to-end QoS architecture .................  19
    6. Conclusions ............................................  21
    7. Security Considerations ................................  21
    8. References .............................................  22
    9. Acknowledgments ........................................  23
   10. Author's Address .......................................  23
   11. Full Copyright Statement ...............................  24

1. Introduction

The default service offering associated with the Internet is characterized as a best-effort variable service response. Within this service profile the network makes no attempt to actively differentiate its service response between the traffic streams generated by concurrent users of the network. As the load generated by the active traffic flows within the network varies, the network's best effort service response will also vary.

The objective of various Internet Quality of Service (QoS) efforts is to augment this base service with a number of selectable service responses. These service responses may be distinguished from the best-effort service by some form of superior service level, or they may be distinguished by providing a predictable service response which is unaffected by external conditions such as the number of concurrent traffic flows, or their generated traffic load.

Any network service response is an outcome of the resources available to service a load, and the level of the load itself. To offer such distinguished services there is not only a requirement to provide a differentiated service response within the network, there is also a requirement to control the service-qualified load admitted into the network, so that the resources allocated by the network to support a particular service response are capable of providing that response for the imposed load. This combination of admission control agents and service management elements can be summarized as "rules plus behaviors". To use the terminology of the Differentiated Service architecture [4], this admission control function is undertaken by a traffic conditioner (an entity which performs traffic conditioning functions and which may contain meters, markers, droppers, and shapers), where the actions of the conditioner are governed by explicit or implicit admission control agents.

As a general observation of QoS architectures, the service load control aspect of QoS is perhaps the most troubling component of the architecture. While there are a wide array of well understood service response mechanisms that are available to IP networks, matching a set of such mechanisms within a controlled environment to respond to a set of service loads to achieve a completely consistent service response remains an area of weakness within existing IP QoS architectures. The control elements span a number of generic requirements, including end-to-end application signaling, end-to- network service signaling and resource management signaling to allow policy-based control of network resources. This control may also span a particular scope, and use 'edge to edge' signaling, intended to support particular service responses within a defined network scope.

One way of implementing this control of imposed load to match the level of available resources is through an application-driven process of service level negotiation (also known as application signaled QoS). Here, the application first signals its service requirements to the network, and the network responds to this request. The application will proceed if the network has indicated that it is able to carry the additional load at the requested service level. If the network indicates that it cannot accommodate the service requirements the application may proceed in any case, on the basis that the network will service the application's data on a best effort basis. This negotiation between the application and the network can take the form of explicit negotiation and commitment, where there is a single negotiation phase, followed by a commitment to the service level on the part of the network. This application-signaled approach can be used within the Integrated Services architecture, where the application frames its service request within the resource reservation protocol (RSVP), and then passes this request into the network. The network can either respond positively in terms of its agreement to commit to this service profile, or it can reject the request. If the network commits to the request with a resource reservation, the application can then pass traffic into the network with the expectation that as long as the traffic remains within the traffic load profile that was originally associated with the request, the network will meet the requested service levels. There is no requirement for the application to periodically reconfirm the service reservation itself, as the interaction between RSVP and the network constantly refreshes the reservation while it remains active. The reservation remains in force until the application explicitly requests termination of the reservation, or the network signals to the application that it is unable to continue with a service commitment to the reservation [3]. There are variations to this model, including an aggregation model where a proxy agent can fold a number of application-signaled reservations into a common aggregate reservation along a common sub-path, and a matching deaggregator can reestablish the collection of individual resource reservations upon leaving the aggregate region [5]. The essential feature of this Integrated Services model is the "all or nothing" nature of the model. Either the network commits to the reservation, in which case the requestor does not have to subsequently monitor the network's level of response to the service, or the network indicates that it cannot meet the resource reservation.

An alternative approach to load control is to decouple the network load control function from the application. This is the basis of the Differentiated Services architecture. Here, a network implements a load control function as part of the function of admission of traffic into the network, admitting no more traffic within each service category as there are assumed to be resources in the network to deliver the intended service response. Necessarily there is some element of imprecision in this function given that traffic may take an arbitrary path through the network. In terms of the interaction between the network and the application, this takes the form of a service request without prior negotiation, where the application requests a particular service response by simply marking each packet with a code to indicate the desired service. Architecturally, this approach decouples the end systems and the network, allowing a network to implement an active admission function in order to moderate the workload that is placed upon the network's resources without specific reference to individual resource requests from end systems. While this decoupling of control allows a network's operator greater ability to manage its resources and a greater ability to ensure the integrity of its services, there is a greater potential level of imprecision in attempting to match applications' service requirements to the network's service capabilities.

2. State and Stateless QoS

These two approaches to load control can be characterized as state- based and stateless approaches respectively.

The architecture of the Integrated Services model equates the cumulative sum of honored service requests to the current reserved resource levels of the network. In order for a resource reservation to be honored by the network, the network must maintain some form of remembered state to describe the resources that have been reserved, and the network path over which the reserved service will operate. This is to ensure integrity of the reservation. In addition, each active network element within the network path must maintain a local state that allows incoming IP packets to be correctly classified into a reservation class. This classification allows the packet to be placed into a packet flow context that is associated with an appropriate service response consistent with the original end-to-end service reservation. This local state also extends to the function of metering packets for conformance on a flow-by-flow basis, and the additional overheads associated with maintenance of the state of each of these meters.

In the second approach, that of a Differentiated Services model, the packet is marked with a code to trigger the appropriate service response from the network elements that handles the packet, so that there is no strict requirement to install a per-reservation state on these network elements. Also, the end application or the service requestor is not required to provide the network with advance notice relating to the destination of the traffic, nor any indication of the intended traffic profile or the associated service profile. In the absence of such information any form of per-application or per-path resource reservation is not feasible. In this model there is no maintained per-flow state within the network.

The state-based Integrated Services architectural model admits the potential to support greater level of accuracy, and a finer level of granularity on the part of the network to respond to service requests. Each individual application's service request can be used to generate a reservation state within the network that is intended to prevent the resources associated with the reservation to be reassigned or otherwise preempted to service other reservations or to service best effort traffic loads. The state-based model is intended to be exclusionary, where other traffic is displaced in order to meet the reservation's service targets.

As noted in RFC2208 [2], there are several areas of concern about the deployment of this form of service architecture. With regard to concerns of per-flow service scalability, the resource requirements (computational processing and memory consumption) for running per- flow resource reservations on routers increase in direct proportion to the number of separate reservations that need to be accommodated. By the same token, router forwarding performance may be impacted adversely by the packet-classification and scheduling mechanisms intended to provide differentiated services for these resource- reserved flows. This service architecture also poses some challenges to the queuing mechanisms, where there is the requirement to allocate absolute levels of egress bandwidth to individual flows, while still supporting an unmanaged low priority best effort traffic class.

The stateless approach to service management is more approximate in the nature of its outcomes. Here there is no explicit negotiation between the application's signaling of the service request and the network's capability to deliver a particular service response. If the network is incapable of meeting the service request, then the request simply will not be honored. In such a situation there is no requirement for the network to inform the application that the request cannot be honored, and it is left to the application to determine if the service has not been delivered. The major attribute of this approach is that it can possess excellent scaling properties from the perspective of the network. If the network is capable of supporting a limited number of discrete service responses, and the routers uses per-packet marking to trigger the service response, then the processor and memory requirements in each router do not increase in proportion to the level of traffic passed through the router. Of course this approach does introduce some degree of compromise in that the service response is more approximate as seen by the end client, and scaling the number of clients and applications in such an environment may not necessarily result in a highly accurate service response to every client's application.

It is not intended to describe these service architectures in further detail within this document. The reader is referred to RFC1633 [3] for an overview of the Integrated Services Architecture (IntServ) and RFC2475 [4] for an overview of the Differentiated Services architecture (DiffServ).

These two approaches are the endpoints of what can be seen as a continuum of control models, where the fine-grained precision of the per application invocation reservation model can be aggregated into larger, more general and potentially more approximate aggregate reservation states, and the end-to-end element-by-element reservation control can be progressively approximated by treating a collection of subnetworks or an entire transit network as an aggregate service element. There are a number of work in progress efforts which are directed towards these aggregated control models, including aggregation of RSVP [5], the RSVP DCLASS Object [6] to allow Differentiated Services Code Points (DSCPs) to be carried in RSVP message objects, and operation of Integrated Services over Differentiated Services networks [7].

3. Next Steps for QoS Architectures

Both the Integrated Services architecture and the Differentiated Services architecture have some critical elements in terms of their current definition which appear to be acting as deterrents to widespread deployment. Some of these issues will probably be addressed within the efforts to introduce aggregated control and response models into these QoS architectures, while others may require further refinement through standards-related activities.

3.1 QoS-Enabled Applications

One of the basic areas of uncertainty with QoS architectures is whether QoS is a per-application service, whether QoS is a transport-layer option, or both. Per-application services have obvious implications of extending the QoS architecture into some form of Application Protocol Interface (API), so that applications could negotiate a QoS response from the network and alter their behavior according to the outcome of the response. Examples of this approach include GQOS [8], and RAPI [9]. As a transport layer option, it could be envisaged that any application could have its traffic carried by some form of QoS-enabled network services by changing the host configuration, or by changing the configuration at some other network control point, without making any explicit changes to the application itself. The strength of the transport layer approach is that there is no requirement to substantially alter application behavior, as the application is itself unaware of the administratively assigned QoS. The weakness of this approach is that the application is unable to communicate what may be useful information to the network or to the policy systems that are managing the network's service responses. In the absence of such information the network may provide a service response that is far superior than the application's true requirements, or far inferior than what is required for the application to function correctly. An additional weakness of a transport level approach refers to those class of applications that can adapt their traffic profile to meet the available resources within the network. As a transport level mechanism, such network availability information as may be available to the transport level is not passed back to the application.

In the case of the Integrated Services architecture, this transport layer approach does not appear to be an available option, as the application does require some alteration to function correctly in this environment. The application must be able to provide to the service reservation module a profile of its anticipated traffic, or in other words the application must be able to predict its traffic load. In addition, the application must be able to share the reservation state with the network, so that if the network state fails, the application can be informed of the failure. The more general observation is that a network can only formulate an accurate response to an application's requirements if the application is willing to offer precise statement of its traffic profile, and is willing to be policed in order to have its traffic fit within this profile.

In the case of the Differentiated Services architecture there is no explicit provision for the application to communicate with the network regarding service levels. This does allow the use of a transport level option within the end system that does not require explicit alteration of the application to mark its generated traffic with one of the available Differentiated Services service profiles. However, whether the application is aware of such service profiles or not, there is no level of service assurance to the application in such a model. If the Differentiated Services boundary traffic conditioners enter a load shedding state, the application is not signaled of this condition, and is not explicitly aware that the requested service response is not being provided by the network. If the network itself changes state and is unable to meet the cumulative traffic loads admitted by the ingress traffic conditioners, neither the ingress traffic conditioners, nor the client applications, are informed of this failure to maintain the associated service quality. While there is no explicit need to alter application behavior in this architecture, as the basic DiffServ mechanism is one that is managed within the network itself, the consequence is that an application may not be aware whether a particular service state is being delivered to the application.

There is potential in using an explicit signaling model, such as used by IntServ, but carrying a signal which allows the network to manage the application's traffic within an aggregated service class [6]. Here the application does not pass a complete picture of its intended service profile to the network, but instead is providing some level of additional information to the network to assist in managing its resources, both in terms of the generic service class that the network can associate with the application's traffic, and the intended path of the traffic through the network.

An additional factor for QoS enabled applications is that of receiver capability negotiation. There is no value in the sender establishing a QoS-enabled path across a network to the receiver if the receiver is incapable of absorbing the consequent data flow. This implies that QoS enabled applications also require some form of end-to-end capability negotiation, possibly through a generic protocol to allow the sender to match its QoS requirements to the minimum of the flow resources that can be provided by the network and the flow resources that can be processed by the receiver. In the case of the Integrated services architecture the application end-to-end interaction can be integrated into the RSVP negotiation. In the case of the Differentiated Services architecture there is no clear path of integrating such receiver control into the signaling model of the architecture as it stands.

If high quality services are to be provided, where `high quality' is implied as being `high precision with a fine level of granularity', then the implication is that all parts of the network that may be involved with servicing the request either have to be over- provisioned such that no load state can compromise the service quality, or the network element must undertake explicit allocation of resources to each flow that is associated with each service request.

For end-to-end service delivery it does appear that QoS architectures will need to extend to the level of the application requesting the service profile. It appears that further refinement of the QoS architecture is required to integrate DiffServ network services into an end-to-end service delivery model, as noted in [7].

3.2 The Service Environment

The outcome of the considerations of these two approaches to QoS architecture within the network is that there appears to be no single comprehensive service environment that possesses both service accuracy and scaling properties.

The maintained reservation state of the Integrated Services architecture and the end-to-end signaling function of RSVP are part of a service management architecture, but it is not cost effective, or even feasible, to operate a per-application reservation and classification state across the high speed core of a network [2].

While the aggregated behavior state of the Differentiated Services architecture does offer excellent scaling properties, the lack of end-to-end signaling facilities makes such an approach one that cannot operate in isolation within any environment. The Differentiated Services architecture can be characterized as a boundary-centric operational model. With this boundary-centric architecture, the signaling of resource availability from the interior of the network to the boundary traffic conditioners is not defined, nor is the signaling from the traffic conditioners to the application that is resident on the end system. This has been noted as an additional work item in the IntServ operations over DiffServ work, concerning "definition of mechanisms to efficiently and dynamically provision resources in a DiffServ network region". This might include protocols by which an "oracle" (...) conveys information about resource availability within a DiffServ region to border routers." [7]

What appears to be required within the Differentiated Services service model is both resource availability signaling from the core of the network to the DiffServ boundary and some form of signaling from the boundary to the client application.

3.3 QoS Discovery

There is no robust mechanism for network path discovery with specific service performance attributes. The assumption within both IntServ and DiffServ architectures is that the best effort routing path is used, where the path is either capable of sustaining the service load, or not.

   Assuming that the deployment of service differentiating
   infrastructure will be piecemeal, even if only in the initial stages
   of a QoS rollout, such an assumption may be unwarranted.  If this is
   the case, then how can a host application determine if there is a
   distinguished service path to the destination?  No existing
   mechanisms exist within either of these architectures to query the
   network for the potential to support a specific service profile. Such
   a query would need to examine a number of candidate paths, rather
   than simply examining the lowest metric routing path, so that this
   discovery function is likely to be associated with some form of QoS
   routing functionality.

From this perspective, there is still further refinement that may be required in the model of service discovery and the associated task of resource reservation.

3.4 QoS Routing and Resource Management

To date QoS routing has been developed at some distance from the task of development of QoS architectures. The implicit assumption within the current QoS architectural models is that the routing best effort path will be used for both best effort traffic and distinguished service traffic.

There is no explicit architectural option to allow the network service path to be aligned along other than the single best routing metric path, so that available network resources can be efficiently applied to meet service requests. Considerations of maximizing network efficiency would imply that some form of path selection is necessary within a QoS architecture, allowing the set of service requirements to be optimally supported within the network's aggregate resource capability.

In addition to path selection, SPF-based interior routing protocols allow for the flooding of link metric information across all network elements. This mechanism appears to be a productive direction to provide the control-level signaling between the interior of the network and the network admission elements, allowing the admission systems to admit traffic based on current resource availability rather than on necessarily conservative statically defined admission criteria.

There is a more fundamental issue here concerning resource management and traffic engineering. The approach of single path selection with static load characteristics does not match a networked environment which contains a richer mesh of connectivity and dynamic load characteristics. In order to make efficient use of a rich connectivity mesh, it is necessary to be able to direct traffic with a common ingress and egress point across a set of available network paths, spreading the load across a broader collection of network links. At its basic form this is essentially a traffic engineering problem. To support this function it is necessary to calculate per- path dynamic load metrics, and allow the network's ingress system the ability to distribute incoming traffic across these paths in accordance with some model of desired traffic balance. To apply this approach to a QoS architecture would imply that each path has some form of vector of quality attributes, and incoming traffic is balanced across a subset of available paths where the quality attribute of the traffic is matched with the quality vector of each available path. This augmentation to the semantics of the traffic engineering is matched by a corresponding shift in the calculation and interpretation of the path's quality vector. In this approach what needs to be measured is not the path's resource availability level (or idle proportion), but the path's potential to carry additional traffic at a certain level of quality. This potential metric is one that allows existing lower priority traffic to be displaced to alternative paths. The path's quality metric can be interpreted as a metric describing the displacement capability of the path, rather than a resource availability metric.

This area of active network resource management, coupled with dynamic network resource discovery, and the associated control level signaling to network admission systems appears to be a topic for further research at this point in time.

3.5 TCP and QoS

A congestion-managed rate-adaptive traffic flow (such as used by TCP) uses the feedback from the ACK packet stream to time subsequent data transmissions. The resultant traffic flow rate is an outcome of the service quality provided to both the forward data packets and the reverse ACK packets. If the ACK stream is treated by the network with a different service profile to the outgoing data packets, it remains an open question as to what extent will the data forwarding service be compromised in terms of achievable throughput. High rates of jitter on the ACK stream can cause ACK compression, that in turn will cause high burst rates on the subsequent data send. Such bursts will stress the service capacity of the network and will compromise TCP throughput rates.

   One way to address this is to use some form of symmetric service,
   where the ACK packets are handled using the same service class as the
   forward data packets.  If symmetric service profiles are important
   for TCP sessions, how can this be structured in a fashion that does
   not incorrectly account for service usage?  In other words, how can
   both directions of a TCP flow be accurately accounted to one party?

Additionally, there is the interaction between the routing system and the two TCP data flows. The Internet routing architecture does not intrinsically preserve TCP flow symmetry, and the network path taken by the forward packets of a TCP session may not exactly correspond to the path used by the reverse packet flow.

TCP also exposes an additional performance constraint in the manner of the traffic conditioning elements in a QoS-enabled network. Traffic conditioners within QoS architectures are typically specified using a rate enforcement mechanism of token buckets. Token bucket traffic conditioners behave in a manner that is analogous to a First In First Out queue. Such traffic conditioning systems impose tail drop behavior on TCP streams. This tail drop behavior can produce TCP timeout retransmission, unduly penalizing the average TCP goodput rate to a level that may be well below the level specified by the token bucket traffic conditioner. Token buckets can be considered as TCP-hostile network elements.

The larger issue exposed in this consideration is that provision of some form of assured service to congestion-managed traffic flows requires traffic conditioning elements that operate using weighted RED-like control behaviors within the network, with less deterministic traffic patterns as an outcome. A requirement to manage TCP burst behavior through token bucket control mechanisms is most appropriately managed in the sender's TCP stack.

There are a number of open areas in this topic that would benefit from further research. The nature of the interaction between the end-to-end TCP control system and a collection of service differentiation mechanisms with a network is has a large number of variables. The issues concern the time constants of the control systems, the amplitude of feedback loops, and the extent to which each control system assumes an operating model of other active control systems that are applied to the same traffic flow, and the mode of convergence to a stable operational state for each control system.

3.6 Per-Flow States and Per-Packet classifiers

Both the IntServ and DiffServ architectures use packet classifiers as an intrinsic part of their architecture. These classifiers can be considered as coarse or fine level classifiers. Fine-grained classifiers can be considered as classifiers that attempt to isolate elements of traffic from an invocation of an application (a `micro- flow') and use a number of fields in the IP packet header to assist in this, typically including the source and destination IP addresses and source and source and destination port addresses. Coarse-grained classifiers attempt to isolate traffic that belongs to an aggregated service state, and typically use the DiffServ code field as the classifying field. In the case of DiffServ there is the potential to use fine-grained classifiers as part of the network ingress element, and coarse-gained classifiers within the interior of the network.

Within flow-sensitive IntServ deployments, every active network element that undertakes active service discrimination is requirement to operate fine-grained packet classifiers. The granularity of the classifiers can be relaxed with the specification of aggregate classifiers [5], but at the expense of the precision and accuracy of the service response.

Within the IntServ architecture the fine-grained classifiers are defined to the level of granularity of an individual traffic flow, using the packet's 5-tuple of (source address, destination address, source port, destination port, protocol) as the means to identify an individual traffic flow. The DiffServ Multi-Field (MF) classifiers are also able to use this 5-tuple to map individual traffic flows into supported behavior aggregates.

The use of IPSEC, NAT and various forms of IP tunnels result in a occlusion of the flow identification within the IP packet header, combining individual flows into a larger aggregate state that may be too coarse for the network's service policies. The issue with such mechanisms is that they may occur within the network path in a fashion that is not visible to the end application, compromising the ability for the application to determine whether the requested service profile is being delivered by the network. In the case of IPSEC there is a proposal to carry the IPSEC Security Parameter Index (SPI) in the RSVP object [10], as a surrogate for the port addresses. In the case of NAT and various forms of IP tunnels, there appears to be no coherent way to preserve fine-grained classification characteristics across NAT devices, or across tunnel encapsulation.

IP packet fragmentation also affects the ability of the network to identify individual flows, as the trailing fragments of the IP packet will not include the TCP or UDP port address information. This admits the possibility of trailing fragments of a packet within a distinguished service class being classified into the base best effort service category, and delaying the ultimate delivery of the IP packet to the destination until the trailing best effort delivered fragments have arrived.

The observation made here is that QoS services do have a number of caveats that should be placed on both the application and the network. Applications should perform path MTU discovery in order to avoid packet fragmentation. Deployment of various forms of payload encryption, header address translation and header encapsulation should be undertaken with due attention to their potential impacts on service delivery packet classifiers.

3.7 The Service Set

The underlying question posed here is how many distinguished service responses are adequate to provide a functionally adequate range of service responses?

The Differentiated Services architecture does not make any limiting restrictions on the number of potential services that a network operator can offer. The network operator may be limited to a choice of up to 64 discrete services in terms of the 6 bit service code point in the IP header but as the mapping from service to code point can be defined by each network operator, there can be any number of potential services.

As always, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and a large number of potential services leads to a set of issues around end-to-end service coherency when spanning multiple network domains. A small set of distinguished services can be supported across a large set of service providers by equipment vendors and by application designers alike. An ill-defined large set of potential services often serves little productive purpose. This does point to a potential refinement of the QoS architecture to define a small core set of service profiles as "well-known" service profiles, and place all other profiles within a "private use" category.

3.8 Measuring Service Delivery

There is a strong requirement within any QoS architecture for network management approaches that provide a coherent view of the operating state of the network. This differs from a conventional element-by- element management view of the network in that the desire here is to be able to provide a view of the available resources along a particular path within a network, and map this view to an admission control function which can determine whether to admit a service differentiated flow along the nominated network path.

As well as managing the admission systems through resource availability measurement, there is a requirement to be able to measure the operating parameters of the delivered service. Such measurement methodologies are required in order to answer the question of how the network operator provides objective measurements to substantiate the claim that the delivered service quality conformed to the service specifications. Equally, there is a requirement for a measurement methodology to allow the client to measure the delivered service quality so that any additional expense that may be associated with the use of premium services can be justified in terms of superior application performance.

Such measurement methodologies appear to fall within the realm of additional refinement to the QoS architecture.

3.9 QoS Accounting

It is reasonable to anticipate that such forms of premium service and customized service will attract an increment on the service tariff. The provision of a distinguished service is undertaken with some level of additional network resources to support the service, and the tariff premium should reflect this altered resource allocation. Not only does such an incremental tariff shift the added cost burden to those clients who are requesting a disproportionate level of resources, but it provides a means to control the level of demand for premium service levels.

If there are to be incremental tariffs on the use of premium services, then some accounting of the use of the premium service would appear to be necessary relating use of the service to a particular client. So far there is no definition of such an accounting model nor a definition as to how to gather the data to support the resource accounting function.

The impact of this QoS service model may be quite profound to the models of Internet service provision. The commonly adopted model in both the public internet and within enterprise networks is that of a model of access, where the clients service tariff is based on the characteristics of access to the services, rather than that of the actual use of the service. The introduction of QoS services creates a strong impetus to move to usage-based tariffs, where the tariff is based on the level of use of the network's resources. This, in turn, generates a requirement to meter resource use, which is a form of usage accounting. This topic was been previously studied within the

IETF under the topic of "Internet Accounting" [11], and further refinement of the concepts used in this model, as they apply to QoS accounting may prove to be a productive initial step in formulating a standards-based model for QoS accounting.

3.10 QoS Deployment Diversity

It is extremely improbable that any single form of service differentiation technology will be rolled out across the Internet and across all enterprise networks.

Some networks will deploy some form of service differentiation technology while others will not. Some of these service platforms will interoperate seamlessly and other less so. To expect all applications, host systems, network routers, network policies, and inter-provider arrangements to coalesce into a single homogeneous service environment that can support a broad range of service responses is an somewhat unlikely outcome given the diverse nature of the available technologies and industry business models. It is more likely that we will see a number of small scale deployment of service differentiation mechanisms and some efforts to bridge these environments together in some way.

In this heterogeneous service environment the task of service capability discovery is as critical as being able to invoke service responses and measure the service outcomes. QoS architectures will need to include protocol capabilities in supporting service discovery mechanisms.

In addition, such a heterogeneous deployment environment will create further scaling pressure on the operational network as now there is an additional dimension to the size of the network. Each potential path to each host is potentially qualified by the service capabilities of the path. While one path may be considered as a candidate best effort path, another path may offer a more precise match between the desired service attributes and the capabilities of the path to sustain the service. Inter-domain policy also impacts upon this path choice, where inter-domain transit agreements may specifically limit the types and total level of quality requests than may be supported between the domains. Much of the brunt of such scaling pressures will be seen in the inter-domain and intra-domain routing domain where there are pressures to increase the number of attributes of a routing entry, and also to use the routing protocol in some form of service signaling role.

3.11 QoS Inter-Domain signaling

QoS Path selection is both an intra-domain (interior) and an inter- domain (exterior) issue. Within the inter-domain space, the current routing technologies allow each domain to connect to a number of other domains, and to express its policies with respect to received traffic in terms of inter-domain route object attributes. Additionally, each domain may express its policies with respect to sending traffic through the use of boundary route object filters, allowing a domain to express its preference for selecting one domain's advertised routes over another. The inter-domain routing space is a state of dynamic equilibrium between these various route policies.

The introduction of differentiated services adds a further dimension to this policy space. For example, while a providers may execute an interconnection agreement with one party to exchange best effort traffic, it may execute another agreement with a second party to exchange service qualified traffic. The outcome of this form of interconnection is that the service provider will require external route advertisements to be qualified by the accepted service profiles. Generalizing from this scenario, it is reasonable to suggest that we will require the qualification of routing advertisements with some form of service quality attributes. This implies that we will require some form of quality vector-based forwarding function, at least in the inter-domain space, and some associated routing protocol can pass a quality of service vector in an operationally stable fashion.

The implication of this requirement is that the number of objects being managed by routing systems must expand dramatically, as the size and number of objects managed within the routing domain increases, and the calculation of a dynamic equilibrium of import and export policies between interconnected providers will also be subject to the same level of scaling pressure.

This has implications within the inter-domain forwarding space as well, as the forwarding decision in such a services differentiated environment is then qualified by some form of service quality vector. This is required in order to pass exterior traffic to the appropriate exterior interconnection gateway.

3.12 QoS Deployment Logistics

   How does the widespread deployment of service-aware networks
   commence?  Which gets built first - host applications or network
   infrastructure?

No network operator will make the significant investment in deployment and support of distinguished service infrastructure unless there is a set of clients and applications available to make immediate use of such facilities. Clients will not make the investment in enhanced services unless they see performance gains in applications that are designed to take advantage of such enhanced services. No application designer will attempt to integrate service quality features into the application unless there is a model of operation supported by widespread deployment that makes the additional investment in application complexity worthwhile and clients who are willing to purchase such applications. With all parts of the deployment scenario waiting for the others to move, widespread deployment of distinguished services may require some other external impetus.

Further aspects of this deployment picture lie in the issues of network provisioning and the associated task of traffic engineering. Engineering a network to meet the demands of best effort flows follows a well understood pattern of matching network points of user concentrations to content delivery network points with best effort paths. Integrating QoS-mediated traffic engineering into the provisioning model suggests a provisioning requirement that also requires input from a QoS demand model.

4. The objective of the QoS architecture

   What is the precise nature of the problem that QoS is attempting to
   solve?  Perhaps this is one of the more fundamental questions
   underlying the QoS effort, and the diversity of potential responses
   is a pointer to the breadth of scope of the QoS effort.

All of the following responses form a part of the QoS intention:

• To control the network service response such that the response to a specific service element is consistent and predictable.

• To control the network service response such that a service element is provided with a level of response equal to or above a guaranteed minimum.

• To allow a service element to establish in advance the service response that can or will be obtained from the network.

• To control the contention for network resources such that a service element is provided with a superior level of network resource.

• To control the contention for network resources such that a service element does not obtain an unfair allocation of resources (to some definition of 'fairness').

• To allow for efficient total utilization of network resources while servicing a spectrum of directed network service outcomes.

Broadly speaking, the first three responses can be regarded as 'application-centric', and the latter as 'network-centric'. It is critical to bear in mind that none of these responses can be addressed in isolation within any effective QoS architecture. Within the end-to-end architectural model of the Internet, applications make minimal demands on the underlying IP network. In the case of TCP, the protocol uses an end-to-end control signal approach to dynamically adjust to the prevailing network state. QoS architectures add a somewhat different constraint, in that the network is placed in an active role within the task of resource allocation and service delivery, rather than being a passive object that requires end systems to adapt.

5. Towards an end-to-end QoS architecture

The challenge facing the QoS architecture lies in addressing the weaknesses noted above, and in integrating the various elements of the architecture into a cohesive whole that is capable of sustaining end-to-end service models across a wide diversity of internet platforms. It should be noted that such an effort may not necessarily result in a single resultant architecture, and that it is possible to see a number of end-to-end approaches based on different combinations of the existing components.

One approach is to attempt to combine both architectures into an end-to-end model, using IntServ as the architecture which allows applications to interact with the network, and DiffServ as the architecture to manage admission the network's resources [7]. In this approach, the basic tension that needs to be resolved lies in difference between the per-application view of the IntServ architecture and the network boundary-centric view of the DiffServ architecture.

One building block for such an end-to-end service architecture is a service signaling protocol. The RSVP signaling protocol can address the needs of applications that require a per-service end-to-end service signaling environment. The abstracted model of RSVP is that of a discovery signaling protocol that allows an application to use a single transaction to communicate its service requirements to both the network and the remote party, and through the response mechanism, to allow these network elements to commit to the service requirements. The barriers to deployment for this model lie in an element-by element approach to service commitment, implying that each network element must undertake some level of signaling and processing as dictated by this imposed state. For high precision services this implies per-flow signaling and per-flow processing to support this service model. This fine-grained high precision approach to service management is seen as imposing an unacceptable level of overhead on the central core elements of large carrier networks.

The DiffServ approach uses a model of abstraction which attempts to create an external view of a compound network as a single subnetwork. From this external perspective the network can be perceived as two boundary service points, ingress and egress. The advantage of this approach is that there exists the potential to eliminate the requirement for per-flow state and per-flow processing on the interior elements of such a network, and instead provide aggregate service responses.

One approach is for applications to use RSVP to request that their flows be admitted into the network. If a request is accepted, it would imply that there is a committed resource reservation within the IntServ-capable components of the network, and that the service requirements have been mapped into a compatible aggregate service class within the DiffServ-capable network [7]. The DiffServ core must be capable of carrying the RSVP messages across the DiffServ network, so that further resource reservation is possible within the IntServ network upon egress from the DiffServ environment. The approach calls for the DiffServ network to use per-flow multi-field (MF) classifier, where the MF classification is based on the RSVP- signaled flow specification. The service specification of the RSVP- signaled resource reservation is mapped into a compatible aggregate DiffServ behavior aggregate and the MF classifier marks packets according to the selected behavior. Alternatively the boundary of the IntServ and DiffServ networks can use the IntServ egress to mark the flow packets with the appropriate DSCP, allowing the DiffServ ingress element to use the BA classifier, and dispense with the per- flow MF classifier.

A high precision end-to-end QoS model requires that any admission failure within the DiffServ network be communicated to the end application, presumably via RSVP. This allows the application to take some form of corrective action, either by modifying it's service requirements or terminating the application. If the service agreement between the DiffServ network is statically provisioned, then this static information can be loaded into the IntServ boundary systems, and IntServ can manage the allocation of available DiffServ behavior aggregate resources. If the service agreement is dynamically variable, some form of signaling is required between the two networks to pass this resource availability information back into the RSVP signaling environment.

6. Conclusions

None of these observations are intended to be any reason to condemn the QoS architectures as completely impractical, nor are they intended to provide any reason to believe that the efforts of deploying QoS architectures will not come to fruition.

What this document is intended to illustrate is that there are still a number of activities that are essential precursors to widespread deployment and use of such QoS networks, and that there is a need to fill in the missing sections with something substantial in terms of adoption of additional refinements to the existing QoS model.

The architectural direction that appears to offer the most promising outcome for QoS is not one of universal adoption of a single architecture, but instead use a tailored approach where aggregated service elements are used in the core of a network where scalability is a major design objective and use per-flow service elements at the edge of the network where accuracy of the service response is a sustainable outcome.

Architecturally, this points to no single QoS architecture, but rather to a set of QoS mechanisms and a number of ways these mechanisms can be configured to interoperate in a stable and consistent fashion.

7. Security Considerations

The Internet is not an architecture that includes a strict implementation of fairness of access to the common transmission and switching resource. The introduction of any form of fairness, and, in the case of QoS, weighted fairness, implies a requirement for transparency in the implementation of the fairness contract between the network provider and the network's users. This requires some form of resource accounting and auditing, which, in turn, requires the use of authentication and access control. The balancing factor is that a shared resource should not overtly expose the level of resource usage of any one user to any other, so that some level of secrecy is required in this environment

The QoS environment also exposes the potential of theft of resources through the unauthorized admission of traffic with an associated service profile. QoS signaling protocols which are intended to undertake resource management and admission control require the use of identity authentication and integrity protection in order to mitigate this potential for theft of resources.

Both forms of QoS architecture require the internal elements of the network to be able to undertake classification of traffic based on some form of identification that is carried in the packet header in the clear. Classifications systems that use multi-field specifiers, or per-flow specifiers rely on the carriage of end-to-end packet header fields being carried in the clear. This has conflicting requirements for security architectures that attempt to mask such end-to-end identifiers within an encrypted payload.

QoS architectures can be considered as a means of exerting control over network resource allocation. In the event of a rapid change in resource availability (e.g. disaster) it is an undesirable outcome if the remaining resources are completely allocated to a single class of service to the exclusion of all other classes. Such an outcome constitutes a denial of service, where the traffic control system (routing) selects paths that are incapable of carrying any traffic of a particular service class.

8. References

   [1]  Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards Process- Revision 3", BCP
        9, RFC 2026, October 1996.
   
   [2]  Mankin, A., Baker, F., Braden, R., O'Dell, M., Romanow, A.,
        Weinrib, A. and L. Zhang, "Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP)
        Version 1 Applicability Statement", RFC 2208, September 1997.
   
   [3]  Braden. R., Clark, D. and S. Shenker, "Integrated Services in
        the Internet Architecture: an Overview", RFC 1633, June 1994.
   
   [4]  Blake, S., Black, D., Carlson, M., Davies, E., Wang, Z. and W.
        Weiss, "An Architecture for Differentiated Services", RFC 2475,
        December 1998.
   
   [5]  Baker, F., Iturralde, C., Le Faucher, F., Davie, B.,
        "Aggregation of RSVP for IPv4 and IPv6 Reservations", Work in
        Progress.
   
   [6]  Bernet, Y., "Format of the RSVP DCLASS Object", RFC 2996,
        November 2000.
   
   [7]  Bernet, Y., Yavatkar, R., Ford, P., Baker, F., Zhang, L., Speer,
        M., Braden, R., Davie, B., Wroclawski, J. and E. Felstaine, "A
        Framework for Integrated Services Operation Over DiffServ
        Networks", RFC 2998, November 2000.
   
   [8]  "Quality of Service Technical Overview", Microsoft Technical
        Library, Microsoft Corporation, September 1999.
   
   [9]  "Resource Reservation Protocol API (RAPI)", Open Group Technical
        Standard, C809 ISBN 1-85912-226-4, The Open Group, December
        1998.
   
   [10] Berger, L. and T. O'Malley, "RSVP Extensions for IPSEC Data
        Flows", RFC 2007, September 1997.

[11] Mills, C., Hirsh, D. and G. Ruth, "Internet Accounting:

Background", RFC 1272, November 1991.

9. Acknowledgments

Valuable contributions to this document came from Yoram Bernet, Brian Carpenter, Jon Crowcroft, Tony Hain and Henning Schulzrinne.

10. Author's Address

Geoff Huston
Telstra
5/490 Northbourne Ave
Dickson ACT 2602
AUSTRALIA

EMail:

          gih@telstra.net

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