Preliminary field-trial for QoS routing and dynamic SLA

Improvements of Internet technology during the last decade have shifted the technical focus from reachability to the quality of communication. There are many technical frameworks, such as Integrated Service and Differentiated Services, which have been standardized to assure the quality of communication. QoS routing is also one of such frameworks. It changes or fixes a route that IP datagrams take, and is also indispensable to put a variety of services into practice. Nevertheless, experiment reports of QoS routing on operational network are quite few, especially with dynamic SLA. Therefore, we still do not know much about the important factors for QoS-enabled network to be realized, such as users' behavior, suitable services to offer, and configuration parameters. In this paper, we carried out field-trial with pseudo QoS routing and dynamic SLA in an actual network built at the WIDE retreat in autumn 2000. In this field-trial, we provide two different types of links to attendees. Attendees chose one of the links, through which their flows go, with our dynamic SLA. We describe the details and the results of this experiment. Our results could help to understand the customers' behavior for differentiated services, and therefore be useful for designing and deploying various QoS technologies.