Hélia Pouyllau, Richard Douville, Nabil Djarallah, and Nicolas Le Sauze (2009)
Economic and technical propositions for inter-domain services
Bell Labs Technical Journal 14(1):185-202.
The next challenge for carriers consists of proposing
value-added services (e.g., videoconferencing) to users
connected to remote domains. Such services cross several
networks and require quality of service (QoS) guarantees.
Establishing them would yield new earnings for transit and
terminal domains. However, setting up such services is a
non-trivial problem for technical, economic, and political
reasons. The technical issues are essentially related to
topology confidentiality, scalability, and heterogeneity -
since carriers deploy different technologies - and to
static interconnection processes for end-toend QoS pricing,
negotiating, provisioning, and monitoring. Economic and
political reasons suggest that the most viable way to
introduce value-added inter-carrier services is to develop
dynamic carrier-cooperative processes with respect to
carrier needs for confidentiality and independence. This
paper depicts this inter-domain context and proposes an
economics-based architecture to automatically establish
inter-domain services. We also present different
algorithmic solutions to improve the end-to-end QoS
provisioning.