%0 Journal Article %J International Journal of Network Management, Wiley InterScience %D 2009 %T QoS experiences in native IPv6 networks %A Christos Bouras %A Dimitris Primpas %A A Liakopoulos %A B Maglaris %A D Kalogeras %X

Deployment of IPv6 technology in research and commercial networks has been accelerated in the last few years. Inevitably, as more advanced services take advantage of the new technology, IPv6 traffic gradually increases. Today, there is limited experience in the deployment of Quality of Service (QoS) for IPv6 traffic in backbone networks that support the Differentiated Services framework. As available software and hardware is designed to handle IPv4 packets, there is a need to accurately measure and validate performance of QoS mechanisms in an IPv6 environment. This paper discusses tests and technical challenges in the deployment of IPv6 QoS in core networks, namely the production dual stack gigabit-speed Greek Research & Education Network - GRNET and the IPv6-only 6NET European test network, using both hardware and software platforms. In either case, we succeeded in delivering advanced transport services to IPv6 traffic and provided different performance guarantees to portions of traffic. The deployed QoS schema was common for IPv6 and IPv4; in most cases both v4 and v6 traffic exhibited comparable performance per class while imposing no significantly different overhead on network elements. A major conclusion of our tests is that the IPv6 QoS mechanisms are efficiently supported with state-of-the-art router cards at gigabit speeds.

%B International Journal of Network Management, Wiley InterScience %V 19 %P 119 - 137 %G eng %N 2 %0 Conference Paper %B The 2005 International Conference on Telecommunication Systems – Modeling and Analysis, Dallas, TX, USA %D 2005 %T QoS experiences in native IPv6 GRNET and 6NET networks %A Christos Bouras %A Dimitris Primpas %A A Liakopoulos %A B Maglaris %A D Kalogeras %X Adoption of IPv6 technology has been accelerated in the last few years but there is limited experience in the deployment of Quality of Service (QoS) for IPv6 traffic in backbone networks. As available software and hardware is designed to handle IPv4 packets, there is a need to accurately measure the performance of QoS mechanisms in an IPv6 environment. This paper discusses tests in the deployment of IPv6 QoS in core networks, namely the production dual stack GRNET and the IPv6-only 6NET networks, using both hardware and software platforms. In either case, we succeeded in delivering advanced transport services to IPv6 traffic and provided different performance guarantees to portions of traffic. The deployed QoS schema was common for IPv6 and IPv4; in most cases both v4 and v6 traffic exhibited comparable performance per class while imposing no significantly different overhead on network elements. A major conclusion of our tests is that the IPv6 QoS mechanisms are efficiently supported with state-of-the-art router cards at gigabit speeds. %B The 2005 International Conference on Telecommunication Systems – Modeling and Analysis, Dallas, TX, USA %P 284 - 292 %8 17 - 20 November %G eng %0 Journal Article %J Journal of Communication Systems, Wiley InterScience %D 2004 %T Providing and verifying advanced IP services in hierarchical DiffServ networks - the case of GEANT %A Christos Bouras %A Afroditi Sevasti %A A Liakopoulos %A B Maglaris %X The differentiated services (DiffServ) framework is widely proposed as an efficient method for providing advanced IP services to large-scale networks, with QoS requirements. However, the provisioning of such services in production networks has proved to be more difficult than initially expected, in defining, setting and verifying appropriate Service Level Agreements (SLAs). GEANT, the Gigabit core pan-European research network, on a pilot basis introduced ‘Premium IP’ service, offering bounded delay and negligible packet loss to the European National Research & Education Networks (NRENs) that it interconnects. However, large scale provisioning of this new service requires the definition of efficient interaction procedures between administrative domains involved and methods for SLA monitoring. This paper focuses on these issues and presents the experience acquired from the early experiments in GEANT, as an example of hierarchical Gigabit multi-domain environment, enabled with QoS provisioning to its constituent NRENs. This model scales more efficiently than the common peering Internet Service provider (ISP) commercial paradigm. Finally, we outline other options that promise QoS, such as Layer 2 VPNs in MPLS backbones, with non-standard (yet) mechanisms. %B Journal of Communication Systems, Wiley InterScience %P 321 - 336 %G eng