Establishment and Management of Virtual End-to-End QoS Paths through Modern Hybrid WANs with TeraPaths

The resource reservation capabilities offered by modern wide area networks, such as ESnet and Internet2, create a new network utilization model that coexists but drastically differs from the standard best-effort network paradigm. These capabilities enable the dedication of network resources to specific users/applications that may suffer from interruptions and other adverse effects because of the default best-effort behavior of networks. Extending the new capabilities through the local area networks of end sites and making them available to end users and applications in a useful, transparent, and scalable manner is a variation of the “last mile” problem. The TeraPaths project at Brookhaven National Laboratory is pioneering a framework that takes advantage of the new capabilities to establish and manage on-demand true end-to-end QoS-aware network paths dedicated to authorized data flows. In this paper, we examine the issues raised by the new end-to-end resource reservation-based networking paradigm and the implications/benefits for end users and applications.