Elsevier

Computer Communications

Volume 29, Issue 16, 12 October 2006, Pages 3250-3264
Computer Communications

Design and implementation of Dynamic Service Negotiation Protocol (DSNP)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2006.05.006Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper describes the design principles and implementation of Dynamic Service Negotiation Protocol (DSNP). DSNP is a protocol to negotiate the Service Level Specification (SLS) at the IP layer. It can be used for service negotiation from host to network, network to host, and network to network. Dynamic negotiation not only provides flexibility to the users, but also lets service providers better utilize their network resources. DSNP can be used in both wireline and wireless networks. It is, however, particularly useful in a mobile environment on account of its light-weight. The usefulness of DSNP is demonstrated on a DiffServ-based wireless testbed.

Introduction

Today many different wireless systems exist, ranging from wireless Personal Area Networks (PANs), wireless Local Area Networks (LANs) to outdoor cellular systems. Even though these systems are evolving now, they are being developed independently and are incompatible with one another. In spite of ITU IMT-2000’s efforts to unify the third generation (3G) wireless systems, it is widely believed that the incompatibility will continue to exist in future. No wireless technology has emerged as a common and long-term universal solution. As a result, a mobile user with ubiquitous connectivity is expected to have multiple radio interfaces, so that the user can choose the interface that provides the best instantaneous connectivity. While this will ensure ubiquitous connectivity, the mobile user will experience varied levels of service depending on the wireless system.

It is also expected that a user will maintain connectivity through devices with diverse abilities. For example, a Personal Computer (PC) may be used at home or inside an office. While driving, a small handset will be more suitable. A Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or laptop can be used when traveling. These devices differ not only in their processing and communication capabilities, but also in the applications they can run. Thus, ubiquitous connectivity results in heterogeneous link layer technologies and diverse user terminals. In such a dynamic environment, it is hardly possible for a service provider to envision the service requirements of the users and provision the network accordingly. Users are also hardly to project what level of service they really need.

As the user will be charged for the services offered, a user would not want to pay for a high grade of service and not enjoy them due to limitations in the link layer or the device. Also, the user does not want to be serviced at a lower grade, if a higher grade of service is feasible. Such requirements can be satisfied only if the user is allowed to negotiate the service requirements dynamically. For example, a premium user carrying a device with limited capabilities can dynamically lower the service quality that matches with the user’s device. The user can again upgrade the service quality, once the user obtains a device with superior capabilities. Similarly, a service provider may advertise a lower price for the services, if the network resources are underutilized. During periods of overload, the service provider can negotiate with users to lower their service grade.

Dynamic service negotiation offers flexibility in providing quality of service (QoS) to a mobile user. Realizing this, next generation wireless initiatives such as 3GPP and 3GPP2 have mandated dynamic service negotiation capability. For instance it says in 3GPP TS 23.107 that “QoS behaviour should be dynamic, i.e., it shall be possible to modify QoS attributes during an active session.” [1]. Similarly, 3GPP2 X.S0013-002 specifies that “Dynamic QoS Negotiation and Resource Allocation: Changes (upgrading or downgrading) of QoS provided to an active IMS session shall be supported based on either the request from the IM application or the current network loads or radio link quality.” [2]. This dynamic service negotiation should be supported in the time scale of user mobility and a mobile user should be able to negotiate with the home and visiting service providers dynamically. When the user is roaming, the home and visiting providers should also be able to negotiate with each other to decide the service that can be offered to the user.

While the advantages of dynamic service negotiation have been accepted, there is no universal standard protocol for carrying out the same in an end-to-end fashion. Although the 3GPP initiative has proposed a protocol for negotiating the Radio Access Bearer (RAB) [3], [4], it is specific for the UMTS architecture and is restricted only to the radio link in 3GPP networks. As IP (Internet Protocol) is becoming a promising universal network-layer protocol over all wireless systems, in this paper we propose Dynamic Service Negotiation Protocol (DSNP) – a protocol to negotiate Service Level Specifications (SLS)1 at the IP layer. DSNP can be used for dynamic service negotiation from host to network, network to network, and network to host. Since DSNP negotiates at layer three, it can be used for end-to-end service negotiation in a network with heterogeneous link layers. In addition, as it is based on IP, DSNP could be used for any IP-based network including 3GPP, 3GPP2, and the Internet.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we enumerate the essential characteristics of any service negotiation protocol. Under Section 3, we compare and contrast DSNP with other related protocols. Section 4 provides an overview of DSNP, while Section 5 describes the details of the protocol. We discuss our experimentation on a real-life testbed in Section 6, and finally conclude in Section 7.

Section snippets

Characteristics of a service negotiation protocol

In this section, we delineate the essential characteristics of any protocol for dynamic service negotiation.

  • 1.

    Transparency to link layer technologies: Although diverse wireless communications systems exist, they essentially consist of several Radio Access Networks (RANs) and a Core Network. A RAN provides radio resources (e.g., radio channels) for mobile users to access the core network. The core network is typically a wireline network used to interconnect RANs and to connect the RANs to other

Related work

Several protocols have been proposed in the literature for dynamic service negotiation. The Resource Negotiation And Pricing (RNAP) protocol developed by Wang and Schulzrinne [6] enables a user/service provider to dynamically negotiate a contracted service, allowing price and transmission parameters to be adjusted according to changes in network conditions and user requirements. RNAP requires the routers along the signaling path to maintain a soft state, resulting in an increased storage

Overview of DSNP

In this section we provide an overview of DSNP, in terms of its features and operation.

Protocol details

In this section, we discuss the service model of DSNP and DSNP’s messages.

Testbed and experimental results

We have implemented DSNP on a wireless DiffServ testbed consisting of a number of laptops, base stations, and routers. The radio layer transport is carried over an IEEE 802.11 compliant WaveLAN system. A cdma2000 emulator that emulates the Packet Data Layer in the Link Access Control (LAC) sublayer of cdma2000 is incorporated. Mobility management for the MS is done using either Mobile IP or Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) [36]. Each MS is equipped with a digital video camera and is capable of

Conclusion and future work

Dynamic service negotiation allows users to adapt their needs dynamically. It also allows service providers to better utilize the network. In this paper we have presented a new protocol, DSNP, for dynamic service negotiation. The strength of DSNP is that it is independent of the underlying link layers, and hence can be very useful for a mobile user moving in a heterogeneous wireless environment. Also, the proposed protocol has less overhead in terms of the state information stored at the

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the contribution of other members of the ITSUMO (Internet Technologies Supporting Universal Mobile Operation) team from Telcordia Technologies, Inc. and Toshiba America Research Incorporated. Jyh-Cheng Chen’s work was sponsored in part by National Science Council (NSC) under the Grant Nos. 95-2752-E-007-003-PAE, 94-2213-E-007-073, and 94-2219-E-009-024.

Jyh-Cheng Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Communications Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. Prior to joining National Tsing Hua University as an assistant professor, he was a research scientist at Bellcore/Telcordia Technologies, Morristown, New Jersey, from August 1998 to August 2001. Dr. Chen has published over sixty papers. He holds eight U.S. patents and one R.O.C. patent. He is a coauthor of the book

References (36)

  • 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), Technical Specification Group, Services and System Aspects, Quality of...
  • 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2), All-IP core network multimedia domain: IP multimedia subsystem – stage 2....
  • 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), Technical Specification Group (TSG) RAN, RAB quality of service negotiation...
  • 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), Technical Specification Group Radio Access Network, RAB quality of service...
  • D. Grossman

    New terminology and clarifications for diffserv

    IETF RFC 3260

    (2002)
  • X. Wang, H. Schulzrinne, RNAP: a resource negotiation and pricing protcol, in: Proceedings of International Workshop on...
  • T.M.T. Nguyen et al.

    COPS-SLS: a service level negotiation protocol for the Internet

    IEEE Communications Magazine

    (2002)
  • D. Durham et al.

    The COPS (common open policy service) protocol

    IETF RFC 2748

    (2000)
  • Tequila Consortium, SrNP: Service Negotiation Protocol, 2001. http://www.ist-equila.org/deliverables (last accessed on...
  • QBone Signaling Design Team, SIBBS: Simple Inter-domain Bandwidth Broker Signaling, 2002....
  • J. Manner, G. Karagiannis, A. McDonald, NSLP for Quality-of-Service signalling, IETF Internet Draft,...
  • V. Sarangan et al.

    Comparative study of protocols for dynamic service negotiation in next generation Internet

    IEEE Communications Magazine

    (2006)
  • 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), Technical Specification Group, Services and System Aspects, General packet...
  • J.-C. Chen et al.

    IP-Based Next-Generation Wireless Networks

    (2004)
  • T.F. Abdelzaher et al.

    QoS negotiation in real-time systems and its application to automated flight control

    IEEE Transactions on Computers

    (2000)
  • A. Hafid, G. von Bochmann, B. Kerherve, A quality of service negotiation procedure for distributed multimedia...
  • T. Plagemann, K.A. Saethre, V. Goebel, Application requirements and QoS negotiation in multimedia systems, in:...
  • S. Blake et al.

    An architecture for differentiated services

    IETF RFC 2475

    (1998)
  • Cited by (5)

    Jyh-Cheng Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Communications Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. Prior to joining National Tsing Hua University as an assistant professor, he was a research scientist at Bellcore/Telcordia Technologies, Morristown, New Jersey, from August 1998 to August 2001. Dr. Chen has published over sixty papers. He holds eight U.S. patents and one R.O.C. patent. He is a coauthor of the book “IP-Based Next-Generation Wireless Networks” published by John Wiley & Sons Inc. in January 2004. Dr. Chen is a Technical Editor of IEEE Wireless Communications. He was a guest editor of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, special issue on “All-IP Wireless Networks”, May 2004. He was the Technical Program Chair of the 3rd International Conference on Information Technology: Research and Education (ITRE ’05). He has been on the technical program committee of numerous international conferences, including IEEE INFOCOM 2005-2006, IEEE GLOBECOM 2005-2006, IEEE WCNC 2005-2006, IEEE ICC 2007. He received his Ph.D. degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1998.

    Venkatesh Sarangan obtained his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, in August 2003. Since then he has been with the Computer Science Department at Oklahoma State University as an assistant professor. His research interests include Internet protocols, wireless and sensor networks, and queuing theory.

    Anthony McAuley received his Ph.D. from Hull University, England in 1985. He was a research fellow in Caltech form 1985-1987. Since 1987 he has been at Telcorida and is currently a Chief Scientist in the Mobile Network group. He helped create and works on government and commercial projects related to wireless and ad hoc networking, particularly autoconfiguration, routing, mobility, security and QoS. Anthony has built several mobile internetworking systems on Linux, designed efficient error control codes and VLSI chips.

    Dr. McAuley has been PI (since 2001) on the ARL sponsored Communication and Networking CTA Task, leading innovative solutions and analysis in the area of domain autoconfiguration, network optimization, location management and routing in large dynamic adhoc networks. He is also part of the CERDEC Network Design project investigating analytic tools for the design of adhoc wireless networks. As part of the projects with commercial and government customers, he has researched: autoconfiguration (domains and addresses), routing (OSPF, BGP, multicast), TCP over wireless networks, FEC protocol boosters, SIP and Mobile IP for mobility management, IPsec, IKE and HAIPE for security. His novel research has contributed to many projects, including TSAT, FCS, PILSNER (which feeds its results into WIN-T), CERDEC MOSAIC, and several DARPA projects (SAPIENT, ACN, and Policy Management).

    Shinichi Baba received the BE and ME degrees from Osaka University in 1986 and 1988, respectively. After joining Toshiba R&D Center, Mr. Baba received the Young Engineer Award of IEICE Japan in 1995. He was a visiting scholar at Distributed Systems Laboratory, CIS, University of Pennsylvania from 1996 to 1997. Since 1999, he engaged in the research on mobile wireless internet technology at Toshiba America Research, Inc. (TARI). Mr. Baba works for PC & Network company in Toshiba now.

    Yoshihiro Ohba is a Research Director in Toshiba America Research Inc. He received B.E., M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Information and Computer Sciences from Osaka University in 1989, 1991 and 1994, respectively. He joined Toshiba in 1991.

    Zong-Hua Liu received his M.S. degree from the Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2005. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in the same department. His research interests include internet protocols and wireless networks.

    A preliminary version of this paper was presented at IEEE ICC 2002 in New York, NY, USA.

    View full text