MESCAL recognises the potential diversity of customer and service requirements for Inter-domain QoS, ranging from residential to enterprise services, from mission-critical to mass market applications. Consequently, MESCAL has developed a range of solution options to match these diverse requirements, with each option engineered to meet a perceived demand.

The Loose Guarantees solution option (LGSO) provides a highly scalable, easily deployable approach to mass-market QoS services. The Loose Guarantee option builds on a number of other MESCAL results – Meta-QoS-Class and q-BGP – to provide end-to-end QoS suitable for a number of widely used QoS-aware services. The limitation is that the QoS guarantees cannot be as strict as in a highly engineered solution, as destination address prefixes are not specified in the peering agreements.

The Statistical Guarantees solution option (SGSO) provides greater control over the end-to-end QoS by establishing QoS paths for specified destination prefixes. Additionally, it is not restrained to providing QoS that conforms to Meta-QoS-Classes as the Statistical Guarantee option is able to combine the QoS classes of domains to meet any end-to-end QoS requirement, while working within the cascaded peering model.

The Hard Guarantees solution option (HGSO) targets QoS-aware services where strict performance guarantees are required, such as mission-critical applications. The Hard Guarantee option establishes end-to-end MPLS LSPs, each with dedicated resources, to provide the required QoS guarantees. The solution option uses the MESCAL Path Computation System (see below) to compute the inter-domain LSP.

Further reading:

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 7. [link]