The DiffServ architecture uses automated agents known as Bandwidth Brokers for provisioning, allocating and managing QoS resources within domains as well as communicating with agents of other domains so that QoS guarantees can be provided across domains. The Bandwidth Brokers attempt to establish an end-to-end Quality of Service through signaling between each other. This leads to an implicit trade-off between scalability and the end- to-end QoS guarantees that can be provided. In this work we propose a new Bandwidth Broker signaling mechanism and show, through extensive simulations, that it is possible to specify end-to-end QoS guarantees that are sufficiently high even when signaling is minimal and link utilizations are very high. We have focused solely on the inter-domain communication between the brokers, assuming that the intra-domain issues have been handled separately. A major aspect of our design is that negotiations between Bandwidth Brokers are modeled as a function of available bandwidth and cost to the respective ISPs of the domains (whom the Bandwidth Brokers represent in business dealings). This makes our approach close to the real world scenario in which brokers will always try to end up with a profit after each negotiation process.
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