MESCAL has defined a Business Model identifying the key actors/stakeholders in the delivery of Inter-domain IP-based QoS and their business relationships. The key stakeholders in the MESCAL Business Model are the Service Provider, IP Network Provider (INP) and Physical Network Provider, along with customers/users. The INP is the primary focus of the MESCAL project as they are responsible for their own network domains and for reaching peering agreements with other INPs to extend the scope of the QoS services that they can offer to their customers and other INPs. In MESCAL, the business relationships between INPs are based on SLA/SLS.

An innovation of MESCAL is that the QoS-based peering agreements are based on a cascaded/bilateral approach that mirrors the current loosely coupled structure of the Internet. In the cascaded model, INPs reach QoS-based agreements with other INPs to whom they are directly peered with the objective of combining the QoS transport capabilities of two domains to create new QoS-based services. The resulting QoS-based services may be further combined with other INP QoS services. MESCAL has compared this cascaded approach to a number of alternatives – hub, hybrid, etc and found that it has good scalability, an essential characteristic when constructing end-to-end QoS services across the Internet.

Further reading:

P. Georgatsos, J. Spencer, D. Griffin, P. Damilatis, H. Asgari, J. Griem, G. Pavlou and P. Morand, "Provider-level Service Agreements for Inter-domain QoS delivery", Proc. Fourth Int. Workshop on Advanced Internet Charging and QoS Technologies (ICQT04), Springer, September 2004. [pdf document] © Springer-Verlag.

M.P. Howarth, P. Flegkas, G. Pavlou, N. Wang, P. Trimintzios, D. Griffin, J. Griem, M. Boucadair, P. Morand, H. Asgari and P. Georgatsos, "Provisioning for Inter-domain quality of service: the MESCAL approach," IEEE Communications Magazine, June 2005. [pdf document]

MESCAL deliverable D1.3, "Final specification of protocols and algorithms for inter-domain SLS management and traffic engineering for QoS-based IP service delivery", Chapter 2. [link]