Global availability of on-demand services with an associated guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS) is still missing in the Internet today. The Differentiated Services architecture achieves scalability in the data plane by treating all flows with a specific type of service as one aggregate. In order to provide guaranteed end-to-end reservations, the control plane (e.g., performing admission control and management of resource reservations) has to be scalable as well. The DARIS architecture provides this essential linkage between scalability in the packet forwarding path and scalability of QoS management in the Internet. It comprises a novel concept of dynamic and hierarchical aggregation, which acts on the network level of autonomous systems (ASes). This relieves management entities in intermediate ASes of processing load by reducing their managed reservation states as well as the number of signaling messages that have to be processed significantly. Moreover, novel and special support for aggregation by a dedicated signaling protocol mechanism is provided.

differentiated services - resource management - reservation aggregation - signaling