• Networking
• QoS
• EuQoS
• NGN

The usage of the Internet continues to grow as well as the number of citizens that, every day, can be reached, using a variety of access network technologies, ranging from dial-up to DSL. Despite the growth in access network capacity, network operators and Internet Service Providers (ISP) are still unable to provide QoS guarantees on their infrastructure. While in the core network it is generally feasible to achieve QoS objectives by means of over provisioning; such over provisioning is not practical in the access networks, due to the limited capabilities of the existing infrastructure and the cost of upgrading it; furthermore, delivery of end to end QoS guarantees requires that the crossed domains, administered by different organisations cooperate in order to provide the required level of service. In this type of scenario, a careful management of the inter-domain resources takes a primary role in order to guarantee the requirements of new multimedia applications. In particular, the main purpose of inter-domain resource optimization is to map incoming inter-domain traffic flows to inter-domain network resources, satisfying QoS requirements, while aiming at optimizing the use of network resources across autonomous systems (AS) boundaries. Network resources usage is, in any case, conditioned by the existing Service Level Specifications (SLSs) that, in turn, result from the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) established by each domain with its neighbours. The purpose of the SLS agreement is to define the maximum amount of traffic that an AS (customer AS) can inject into a neighbouring AS (provider AS), through a inter-domain link, specifying the QoS guarantees that have to be provided by the provider AS inside its network.
The goal of this thesis work is to propose a feasible solution for devising the inter-domain resources, in term of buffer size and capacity, to be allocated in each border router taking into account the set of the SLSs that has been established by the AS. In fact, by knowing i) an upper bound on the amount of traffic outgoing from the inter-domain and ii) the QoS constraints that must be guaranteed to the customer ASs, it is then possible, by means of Network Calculus, to compute the buffer size and the amount of capacity that must be reserved in each device.
The accomplished work has led to the design and implementation of a software module called TERO - Traffic Engineering and Resource Optimisation, which is in charge of traffic engineering and resources provisioning inside the EuQoS network architecture. EuQoS: end-to-end QoS support over heterogeneous networks is a European project started in September 2004, whose goal is to research, integrate, test, validate and demonstrate end to end QoS technologies to support infrastructure update for advanced QoS-aware applications over multiple, heterogeneous network domains, belonging to research, scientific and industrial communities. Among the partners of the project, there are different European telcos, SMEs and universities that cooperate to reach the final goals. The accomplishment of this work has required the participation to several international meetings in order to integrate TERO inside the whole EuQoS architecture. Furthermore, the deployment of intermediate prototypes has allowed the continuous validation of the obtained results.