NCSA NEWS

Internet2, Stanford, and DOE Demonstrate End-to-End Internet QoS

released November 21, 2000

The first-ever demonstration of end-to-end IP quality of service (QoS) over the Abilene backbone occurred last week at SC2000. The Internet2® Abilene backbone network and ESnet's Department of Energy (DOE) Science Grid QoS testbed have partnered with CENIC's CalREN2 gigaPoP, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL), and Stanford University to provide a precise end-to-end "Premium" service for two QoS-sensitive applications over wide-area, interdomain paths. Effective protection of application traffic was demonstrated by inducing heavy congestion at several points along the network paths. For comparison, application traffic was dynamically marked and unmarked at the network edge for Premium treatment and application quality with and without demonstrated.

"Advanced applications such as those demonstrated here will require end-to-end differentiated network services before they can be widely deployed. Our responsive, interactive high fidelity internet audio application are not possible without this kind of support from the network," says Chris Chafe, Director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and Associate Professor of Music, Stanford University.

The QoS network design in this demo reflects the architecture of the Internet2 QBone Premium Service, which builds upon implementations of IETF differentiated services forwarding primitives in the routers and provides near-zero packet loss and bounded jitter to the application streams. Through precise service level specifications at inter-provider boundaries, this architecture supports a well-defined end-to-end service over multiple networks, each of which is independently designed, implemented, and operated (potentially quite differently). For example, in this demonstration, different routers and low-level queuing mechanisms were used within Abilene and ESnet.

"Working with Abilene, we have refined our QoS peering to provide an premium service capability over the concatenation of our two networks. This is an important step to enabling the use of QoS-needy advanced applications between Internet2 universities and DOE laboratories," says Jim Leighton, Energy Sciences Network Project Manager.

"We are excited that, going forward, the backbone QoS capabilities of Abilene and ESnet that have been demonstrated here will remain in place and form a persistent core for the QBone testbed," says Ben Teitelbaum, Senior Network Engineer, Internet2 and Advanced Network & Services.

For further technical detail on this demonstration, see http://www.internet2.edu/abilene/qos/.

Led by over 180 US universities working with industry and government, Internet2 is developing and deploying advanced network applications and technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 recreates the partnership of academia, industry and government that helped foster today's Internet in its infancy. For more information about Internet2, see http://www.internet2.edu/.

The Internet2 QBone initiative has brought together network planners, engineers, and advanced applications developers from across the research and higher education networking community to specify and build an interdomain testbed for IP QoS. The QBone architecture leverages the differentiated services forwarding primitives under standardization in the IETF and aims to provide a virtual leased-line service model across a highly-instrumented and open interdomain testbed. For more information about QBone, see http://qbone.internet2.edu/.

Abilene, a project of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) in partnership with Qwest Communications, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and Indiana University, is an Internet2 backbone network providing nationwide high-performance networking capabilities for over 150 Internet2 universities. For more information on Abilene please see http://www.ucaid.edu/abilene/.

ESnet provides a highly capable and reliable communications infrastructure and leading-edge network services that support the U.S. Department of Energy's missions. The program emphasizes advanced network and distributed computing capabilities needed for forefront scientific research and other Department of Energy (DOE) programs, thus enhancing national competitiveness and accelerating development of future generations of communication and computing technologies. Participating DOE programs and their partners actively contribute to program planning and implementation, and collaborate on development of new technologies that will drive upcoming generations of research capabilities. For more information, see http://www.es.net/.

This work has been performed as part of the QUALIT project—a cooperative agreement between the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development the Department of Energy (DE-FC02-99ER25415). The goal of QUALIT is to promote the deployment of the QBone testbed architecture for differentiated services and to enable the use of QoS-needy advanced applications between Internet2 universities and DOE laboratories.

 

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