The primary strength of the differentiated service architecture is the
ability to achieve end-to-end QoS assurances while: 1) allowing for aggregation
into a small
number of DS behavior aggregates in the core; 2) requiring only bilateral
service level agreements (SLAs) between all participating domains; and
3) allowing for maximal
flexibility in local resource management decisions.
Any inter-domain DiffServ reservation signaling protocol must not break
this model. Only the signaling interfaces between peering QBone domains
should be specified and
not the details of service level agreements or the underlying means
by which individual QBone domains manage their network resources. Indeed,
it is anticipated that within
the QBone there will be significant variation in the implementations
and resource management strategies behind the uniform signaling interface.
Finally, because it is important
to bootstrap non-trivial QoS deployments, any such protocol must mesh
well with the end-to-end signaling capabilities of hosts and must be simple
enough to facilitate rapid
deployment, while remaining flexible enough to support future performance
optimizations and protocol extensions.
SIBBS strives to meet all of these goals. In addition, it
facilitates a flexible mechanism for aggregating signaling messages in
the core. This facility is called virtual peering which ,
as the name suggests, establishes a peering relationship between the bandwidth
brokers of non-adjacent network clouds.