The Competitive Internet Service Provider – Network Architecture, Interconnection, Traffic Engineering and Network Design

Oliver Heckmann is a researcher at the Multimedia Communications laboratory at the Darmstadt University of Technology. His area of expertise is ISPs (internet service providers). He has also worked on the M31 European Union Project (www.m3i.org) which was voted one of the most successful research projects in the EU's Fifth Framework programme which dealt with the implementation of a QoS (Quality of Service) system using Intserv and Diffserv. He is currently working as a consultant for the M31 successor MMAPPSW (www.mmapps.org). Olivier is the technical manager of the LETSQoS (www.letsqos.de) research project that is funded by the German research network provider DFN.

Foreword. List of Figures. List of Tables. List of Abbreviations. Part I Introduction and Basics. 1 Introduction. 1.1 Motivation. 1.2 Efficiency and Quality of Service. 1.3 Action Space and Approach. 1.4 Overview. 2 Internet Service Providers. 2.1 A Classification Model for ISPs. 2.2 Classification of Selected Providers. 2.3 Summary and Conclusions. 3 Performance Analysis Basics. 3.1 Queueing Theory. 3.2 Network Calculus. 3.3 Optimisation Techniques. 3.4 Summary and Conclusions. 4 Internet Protocols. 4.1 The Internet Protocol Stack. 4.2 Summary and Conclusions. 5 Applications. 5.1 World Wide Web. 5.2 Peer-to-Peer Applications. 5.3 Online Games. 5.4 Voice over IP. 5.5 Traffic Classification. 5.6 Summary and Conclusions. Part II Network Architecture. 6 Network Architecture Overview. 6.1 Introduction. 6.2 Quality of Service Architectures. 6.3 Data Forwarding Architecture. 6.4 Signalling Architecture. 6.5 Security Architecture. 6.6 Admission Control. 6.7 Summary and Conclusions. 7 Analytical Comparison of Quality of Service Systems. 7.1 On the Benefit of Admission Control. 7.2 On the Benefit of Service Differentiation. 8 Experimental Comparison of Quality of Service Systems. 8.1 QoS Systems. 8.2 Experiment Setup. 8.3 Per-flow versus Per-class Scheduling. 8.4 Central versus Decentral Admission Control. 8.5 Direct Comparison. 8.6 Summary and Conclusions. Part III Interconnections. 9 Interconnections Overview. 9.1 A Macroscopic View on Interconnections. 9.2 A Microscopic View on Interconnections. 9.3 Interconnection Method. 9.4 Interconnection Mix. 9.5 Summary and Conclusions. 10 Optimising the Interconnection Mix. 10.1 Costs. 10.2 Reliability. 10.3 Quality of Service. 10.4 Environment Changes. 10.5 Summary and Conclusions. Part IV Traffic and Network Engineering. 11 Traffic and Network Engineering Overview. 11.1 Network Design and Network Engineering. 11.2 Traffic Engineering. 11.3 Traffic Matrix Estimation. 11.4 Summary and Conclusions. 12 Evaluation of Traffic Engineering. 12.1 Traffic Engineering Performance Metrics. 12.2 Traffic Engineering Strategies. 12.3 Experiment Setup. 12.4 Explicit Routing versus Path Selection. 12.5 Performance Evaluation. 12.6 Singlepath versus Multipath. 12.7 Influence of the Set of Paths. 12.8 Summary and Conclusions. 13 Network Engineering. 13.1 Quality of Service Systems and Network Engineering. 13.2 Capacity Expansion. 13.3 On the Influence of Elastic Traffic. 13.4 Summary and Conclusions. Part V Appendices. A Topologies Used in the Experiments. B Experimental Comparison of Quality-of-service Systems. C Analytical Comparison of Interconnection Methods. C.1 Internet Exchange Point Cost Models. C.2 Cost Efficiency of an Internet Exchange Point. C.3 LAN versus MAN IXP Structure. D Elasticity of Traffic Matrices - Network Models. D.1 Basic Model. D.2 Discrete Service Times. D.3 Self-similar Traffic. D.4 Related Work. References. Index.