Christian Winkler

Providing sustainable QoS in next-generation networks

In this article we discuss QoS from a somewhat unconventional point of view. First of all, we argue that high availability is a key ingredient in the QoS perceived by the user. High availability with extremely short interruptions in case of failure is needed for acceptable QoS in real-time dialog services such as telephony or video conferencing. Second, an even distribution of the traffic load over the network is essential to ensure efficient network utilization given that some kind of admission control for QoS traffic has to be in place for overload avoidance. Unfortunately, both these features are not adequately provided in current IP networks. We therefore introduce a new routing scheme offering a massive improvement in availability as well as efficient traffic distribution, while causing only minor computational effort. Our proposals are then evaluated for a high-speed core network. We claim that our proposed approach would be a useful basis for QoS services in an NGN.

Towards carrier-grade next generation networks

This paper describes the objectives, concepts and solution approach of the KING research project, which is carried out jointly by a number of leading research organisations in Germany. Our overall objective is to develop efficient solutions for carrier-grade IP networks. The distinguishing characteristic of our approach is that we pursue an integrated solution to achieve the carrier-grade requirements for quality of service (QoS) and resilience as well as low-cost efficient operation.