The Internet 2 QBONE Project Architecture and Phase 1 Implementation

Abstract

As IP-based real-time services move into the mainstream of national and international communications infrastructure, the need for a differentiated services framework becomes more important. The Internet 2 QBONE group is focused on building such a differentiated services framework atop NSF supported high performance networks - namely, Abilene and the vBNS. The QBONE proposes to offer an expedited forwarding (EF) service from campus edge to campus edge. This EF service includes marking and admission control at the ingress edge and forwarding and rate shaping in the core transit network and at the egress edge. Further, the QBONE framework includes a bandwidth broker (BB) function for negotiating diffserv behaviours across domain (AS) boundaries. Finally, QBONE domains are instrumented with measuring and monitoring equipment for verification and traffic profiling (and research).

In this paper, we describe the phase one QBONE architecture, some exercising applications, and some preliminary results. Some results are based on applications sourced in the North Carolina Networking Initiative’s (NCNI) NC GigaPOP. Other results are based on interoperability tests performed in association with NC State University’s Centennial Networking Labs (CNL).