Incremental provision of QoS guarantees using only available QoS-aware routers

Most proposals related to QoS provision on the Internet share a common requirement to be deployed: every router within every Autonomous System of the Internet needs to be upgraded to support specific procedures for QoS provision. The main aim of the proposal presented in this paper is to allow QoS provision over IP networks without the need for upgrades at every router. In this paper, an overlay topology is built up only from routers which support QoS provision features and it is managed by an agent called Network Broker. Upgrading some routers within the network is still needed, but there are no constraints as to which routers should be upgraded. As a result, providers could incrementally deploy QoS services over their networks. Using two new routing algorithms, results confirm that the more routers that are upgraded, the better the capacity of the network to provide QoS services.