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-to-end 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.
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