With the transition of services like telephony to be carried over IP networks there is the potential for catastrophic numbers of calls to fail whenever sufficient demand is focused on unpredictable points in the core IP network. This is well known; service differentiation helps but does not alleviate the problem -call admission control is required but seems expensive for the few occasions it is needed. This paper describes a BT-developed experimental mechanism (based on work done by TUDarmstadt within the Market Managed Multiservice Internet collaborative project -http://www.m3i.org/) called guaranteed QoS synthesis (GQS) that performs call admission for core IP networks for constant bit rate streams (voice and video). The mechanism is primarily aimed at Internet services but it may be possible to extend it for VPN applications. The GQS mechanism is economic to deploy and operate, and scales without any increase in complexity. It achieves these properties by keeping no flow state in the network and basing call admission decisions on the measured congestion across the network. The paper describes the high-level GQS architecture as well as some of the deployment issues and potential savings in the operational support area. How GQS enables the separation of the interconnect QoS and retail business models is also explained.

This paper investigates the changes that are required in networking technology for 'everything over IP' to become a reality. Initially the changes that are taking place in the telecommunications industry are reviewed. This review ranges from a discussion about the companies installing massive global IP networks to the emergence of novel routeing technologies, e.g. multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) and terabit router technologies. The role of existing telecommunications operators is then discussed, along with the reasons why they are developing interworking and intelligence layers based on distributed computing principles to support all their networks -mobile, fixed, broadband and IP.

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