Terry Gray
University of Washington
Rev 99.08.13.22
Enterprise Quality of Service (QoS) concerns the transformation of current
best-effort, single-class-of-service internets into systems that can offer
one or more levels of preferred service to certain classes of users or
applications. The goal of having a network with preferred service levels
is to increase the probability that critical or demanding applications
will receive enough bandwidth (and absence of delay) to succeed. The
importance of having preferred service levels depends on the amount of
(instantaneous) congestion in the enterprise network. The term QoS is
susceptible to many different definitions, and a wide spectrum of
implementation approaches. Choosing the "best" one will require making
decisions about the relative costs of network capacity and the machinery
to manage it.
There are three kinds of people with respect to network QoS: optimists,
pessimists, and fence-sitters. Optimists believe that the cost of
bandwidth is or soon will be less than the cost of complex mechanisms for
managing it. Pessimists believe that bandwidth will always be scarce and
therefore complex end-to-end QoS mechanisms will be essential in order for
advanced applications to succeed in a shared Internet infrastructure. The
fence-sitters want to believe the optimists (and indeed do believe them
with respect to campus/enterprise bandwidth) but aren't so sure about
wide-area bandwidth (notwithstanding advances such as DWDM). In any case,
the fence-sitters figure they better have a contingency plan in case the
pessimists are, at least partially, right.
This paper attempts to identify key issues in enterprise QoS, and then
outlines a "fence-sitter" strategy that emphasizes operational simplicity
but also tries to hedge bets. Key points include:
- The problem focus is providing support for different classes of
service in a campus or enterprise network infrastructure. The
principal concerns are recurring costs and network reliability.
- While attempting to provide a specific level of service for certain
applications or users, real-world QoS solutions must also preserve
some minimum amount of bandwidth for baseline or best-effort service.
(Network managers can die at the hands of the few or the many :)
- Different QoS strategies are appropriate for different parts of a
network, depending on probabilities of congestion (as well as
non-technical issues.) Three different "congestion zones" are
identified: local subnet, enterprise backbone, and border/wide-area.
- Within a particular "congestion zone", the desireability of using
admission control or other "heavy weight" QoS mechanisms depends on
the answers to several key questions, in particular: a) Is the cost of
bandwidth greater or less than the cost of managing it? b) Is the
prevailing economic environment such that a revenue stream exists to
allow adding capacity? c) If capacity is insufficient, do you prefer to
disappoint users via poor session performance, or via denial of service
(busy signals)?
- One conclusion: IF bandwidth costs more than managing it, AND there is
inadequate revenue for adding capacity, AND busy signals are preferable
to degraded sessions, THEN admission control is necessary and desirable
(but probably not otherwise).
- If different portions of a network may have different (or no) packet
prioritization mechanisms, what differentiation info should be carried
in each packet? As a model for thinking about packet prioritization
requirements consider the following taxonomy: Differentiation by a)
application type/need, b) user/application desire, and c)
user/application privilege. These three criteria can be mapped to
distinct sets of bits in a frame (specifcally: port number, TOS/DS
byte, and 802.1p/Q priority/VLAN bits).
- Avoiding the use of heavy-weight QoS mechanisms (e.g. per-session
authentication/authorization/accounting/reservation and admission
control) within the enterprise network is very appealing in order
to avoid their impact on recurring operational costs and reliability.
- We worry about any scheme that makes an organization's most
important strategic infrastructure asset (the ability to forward
packets) dependent on authentication and policy servers that are
not now needed for per-packet forwarding decisions.
- Perhaps the most important network design objective for the future
will be to minimize "policy jitter", that is, the rate-of-change of
QoS policies over time and their associated costs. There is evidence
that the only way to accomplish this goal is to seriously limit the
number of available policy options.
- In summary, UW's specific network QoS infrastructure goals include:
- Avoid doing things that reduce network reliability (e.g.
making packet forwarding path dependent on auth or policy
servers.)
- Avoid doing things that cost a lot, especially on a recurring
basis (e.g. adding policy management complexity).
- Provide near-congestion-free network service on campus via
a switched 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet hierarchy.
- Provide capacity for high-bandwidth experiments in such a way
that they will not interfere with baseline production services,
e.g. via separate fibers or lambdas, or MPLS circuit emulation.
- Have a low-overhead way to take advantage of the multiple queues
inherent in comtemporary switches if/when needed.
- Provide appropriate interfaces to WAN QoS mechanisms.
Said differently, our strategy is to build a network infrastructure that
can support multiple classes of service without introducing the complexity
of per-session admission control (via per-user authentication or
per-packet or per-flow lookups or reservations). It should be amenable to
several different premium service policy models, e.g. charging per-port
subscription and/or usage fees and/or support for differential queuing
based on application need, especially delay-sensitivity. The UW model
also allows for end-systems to signal campus border routers acting as
bandwidth brokers (e.g. via RSVP) if necessary to negotiate for wide-area
premium service, and for "very long term" reservations (i.e. segregated
bandwidth) or MPLS virtual circuits among enterprise sites for IP
telephony, IP videoconferencing, etc.
For the complete 50 page paper see Enterprise QoS Survival Guide: 1999 Edition