January 2010
– March 2013
January 2010
Executive Summary
Digital content and services are currently delivered via the Internet to one third of the world population, which represents a revolutionary development that occurred in only a few decades. Traffic is still rapidly growing globally in all different network segments and in particular in mature Internet broadband access markets. However, current Internet technologies and business models for network interconnection may not be adequate for the future sustainable developments of all the actors in the Internet value chain, from the content and application providers (CAPs) to the network service providers (NSPs). Today, only best-effort (BE) connectivity is supported at NSPs’ interconnection points governed by traditional Internet peering and transit (wholesale) agreements, which limits what the NSPs and CAPs can offer in their retail markets. As a result, the end-customers are typically uncertain about what Quality of Experience (QoE) to expect, and assured service quality is not provided.
With the objective of going beyond the current situation and considering the huge coordination and collaboration challenges, some of the main European carriers, vendors and research centres teamed up to form the EU-funded research project ETICS (Economics and Technologies for Inter-carrier Services). This project aimed to create a sustainable ecosystem where the various actors involved in the interconnection have technical and economic incentives to collaborate and invest.
In this whitepaper, we elaborate on the challenges facing the industry. Solutions are proposed to overcome these difficulties based on new assured service quality (ASQ) interconnection ‘goods’ and charging principles, and new ways of coordinating business between NSPs. In particular, ETICS introduced the Sending Party Network Pays (SPNP) principle for NSP-to-NSP ASQ IP traffic exchange. From this basis we suggest that a variety of retail business models can be established (“on-top-of SPNP”) to enable inter-carrier ASQ connectivity services for the future needs of end-customers. It is expected that these ASQ-oriented business models will be introduced gradually and will coexist with the current best-effort business models.
On the technical part, ETICS suggests the use of a Network and Service Business Plane (NSBP) working in overlay to heterogeneous technologies used by the NSPs in their domains as well as between domains, and facilitating Business-to-Business (B2B)-like network service negotiation between operators. The main goal of the ETICS technical proposals is to allow ASQ-enabled NSPs to offer and exchange information on possible Assured Service Quality (ASQ) paths that they each can provide in order to accommodate the ASQ connectivity demands from their retail or wholesale customers. To realize this new plane, we proposed in the ETICS framework a technical tool-kit including different mechanisms for the exchange and negotiation of ASQ interconnection and inter-carrier offerings among NSPs, as well as for the coordination of ASQ configuration across heterogeneous networks. As some of the mechanisms may appear to be more suitable for advanced future needs, this paper describes a roadmap ranging from simple initial and short-term implementation steps, to more complex collaborative optimisations and greater automation, in order to improve the overall efficiency as the ASQ market matures.
ASQ interconnections are an opportunity for the future. The new types of ‘goods’ monetized among the different actors allow for more transparent and predictable services, and a more fair revenue sharing among actors. Complementing current Best Effort agreements, ASQ services provide more choices to service providers and users, enabling a richer set of personalized services. We believe that our recommendations include relevant ingredients to have a more virtuous circle, which can help to make the network industry move forward in a direction beneficial to the wider group of Internet actors as well as for society.
Content
Context _______________________________________________________________________________ 4 Motivations ____________________________________________________________________________ 5
A. Problems in need of solutions ... 5
B. Recommendations and solution principles ... 6
C. Internet Neutrality ... 8
Business model proposals ________________________________________________________________ 9 D. Services that enable assured quality end-to-end ... 9
E. Collaboration modes and communities ... 10
F. Charging principles ... 11
Technical proposals ____________________________________________________________________ 13 G. “Bootstrapping” and short term ... 14
H. Bilateral Cascading Mode ... 15
I. Coordinated Composition Mode ... 16
J. Enabling End-User ASQ Connectivity Services ... 18
Conclusion ____________________________________________________________________________ 20 K. References ... 21
Context
In just a few decades, Internet has become a major mean to deliver digital content and services to one third of the world population. In Western countries, the majority of the population is already connected, although with varying access capacities and usage patterns. Traffic is still rapidly growing in all network segments and in particular in mature broadband access markets. This is imposing significant new investments in high speed Internet access networks (FTTx, LTE, etc.), but also in other network segments. Current Internet technologies and business models for network interconnection may yet not be sufficient for a sustainable development of all the actors of the value chain, from the application to the network service providers (NSPs).
The Internet is an essential Information society tool, when used for human interactions, business and medical applications, and in emerging types of services (e.g. remote robotics, 3D telepresence, etc.). With increasing demands for sophisticated applications, we anticipate that the enablement of end-to-end service quality will be a cornerstone of the future Internet driven by customers expecting predictable QoE and assured quality for a wide range of services. This will include a richer set of service guarantees in terms of availability, latency, throughput and geographical routing or security constraints.
However, the industry is facing a dead-lock like situation [Del2.1] where only BE Internet interconnection is supported via the traditional IP peering and IP transit (wholesale) interconnection agreements, which also limits what the NSPs can offer in their retail markets. Additional services with predictable Quality of Service (QoS) should thus be introduced to complement BE interconnection, in order to unlock the situation.
Figure 1: ETICS main scenario
To go beyond the current situation and tackle huge coordination and collaboration challenges, some of the main European carriers, vendors and research centres teamed up to form the EU-funded ETICS project (Economics and Technologies for Inter-carrier Services).
ETICS research focused on the study of a sustainable ecosystem where the interconnected heterogeneous networks are both technically and economically reconsidered (Figure 1).
Therefore, the first goal was to define new assured quality interconnection services and associated business models, inciting companies to invest in new services and infrastructures satisfying all the actors of the value chain. Including a more fair distribution of the revenues among actors and choices for different quality levels provide relevant ingredients to create a more virtuous circle for the usage and operation of future networks. The objective was also to automate the dissemination of network service offers and the resulting end-to-end service provisioning across multiple NSPs using different network control, management, operation and business systems.
In this whitepaper, we elaborate on these challenges and explain ETICS’s proposed solutions to overcome them. These solutions are based on new assured services quality (ASQ) interconnection ‘goods’ and ways of coordinating business between NSPs, in order to make the industry move forward in a direction beneficial for all industry actors as well as for the end-customers, and as such for the whole society.
S LA monitoring S LA monitoringS LA monitoring S LA monitoring CAC p olicies CAC p olicies CAC p olicies CAC p olicies Protocol adaptation
Protocol adaptationProtocol adaptation Protocol adaptation
P reserving network confidentiality P reserving network confidentialityP reserving network confidentiality P reserving network confidentiality Enhancing business relation to valorize new augmented services
agreements Negotiate SLS publication Business policies Control Activation End End End
End----totototo----End End End End Assured Service Quality (ASQ)Assured Service Quality (ASQ)Assured Service Quality (ASQ)Assured Service Quality (ASQ) Service demand / Service demand / Service demand / Service demand / Service request Service request Service request Service request Compose Open Market ? Service/Business Plane Alliance ? Automated Automated Automated Automated processes processes processes processes
Motivations
The following main targets are important for the development of feasible business and technical solutions for future network interconnections.
Increase efficiency in total resource use. Network efficiency and resource gains can be achieved with a higher average utilization of network infrastructures, thanks to resource awareness in future service design and delivery, leading to better multiplexing, service-aware routing and protection, and more efficient load balancing.
Increase welfare from service use, by offering larger choice of products and services in both the wholesale and retail markets. In general, product differentiation is known to increase welfare as it allows heterogeneous consumers to choose consumption bundles matching their individual preferences. It has also been demonstrated that when quality-of-experience aspects are included in the traffic classification process the user utility increases [Wahlmueller12].
Enable new applications with high-value traffic. New high-value services can be made possible with assured network quality in place. Examples are business cloud connectivity services with network Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and assured high definition videoconferencing across multiple NSPs. The potentials for new innovations typically involve increased network and geographical scale.
Maintain investment incentives and a healthy level of competition. Network investments are needed if current IP traffic growth expectations are to be fulfilled. [Cisco13] e.g. expects a threefold increase in global IP traffic over the five years from 2012 to 2017, corresponding to an annual growth rate of 23% worldwide and 17% in Western Europe. When the number of Internet users’ subscriptions was growing fast, investments were made under the assumption that revenue growth will follow simply through the increased amount of subscriptions. However, the number of individuals using the Internet in Europe increased by less than 4% in 2012, and 76% of the population is now already connected [H2020]. In markets without revenue growth large enough to cover capacity investments, cost reduction efforts such as network sharing and consolidation are natural responses, but with clear limitations [OECD12]. An ASQ-based architecture could be an additional way for NSPs to obtain new revenues from Internet traffic growth through new services with enhanced Quality of Service (QoS), with more efficient use of the network infrastructure, and while preserving open competition.
Create new opportunities for low-end innovation. New services could be made possible due to the indirect effect of improved efficiency. Such services could be e.g. ultra-low cost Internet access for applications that are not interactive or time critical. However, these could be disruptive innovations in the sense that they address un-served or underserved market needs and are often out of scope for existing actors [Christensen97].
A.
Problems in need of solutions
These general motivations crystallize two major problems: the lack of predictable and assured end-to-end quality connectivity in the Internet and revenue sharing that is not in line with relative investments from the different actors. Introducing a new architecture for ASQ goods exchange allows to create an interplay between the two problems. In this context, five identified main issues need to be handled:
Asymmetric information drives high quality out of the market place. It is very difficult for a buyer of Internet connectivity to be certain what the quality will be, as performance is only measured at given probing points and/or times. Since customers cannot easily compare the Internet quality between providers, they tend to pay for an expected average market quality. Without receiving clear compensations for high quality, providers avoid offering it, hindering a global quality increase. This is a vicious circle, driving high quality out of the market.
Lack of coordination. We observe an interconnection market suffering from peering disputes and peering games where the values of content and of connectivity are mixed. This shows how the market is lacking a common and coordinated approach and business models that can take the actors beyond the current situation. It is expected to get worse as traffic is increasingly asymmetric and dominated by video streaming. Hence, the traditional IP transit service is not as adapted as before and should be complemented by ASQ interconnection.
Misuse of market power and local monopolies. Inefficiencies occur when single actors obtain too much market power. With market power in an essential service component, cross-subsidization or bundling can establish a price squeeze, while creating attractive bundles that contain a monopoly component further mitigating competition. In the Internet services value chain, large application service providers with extremely popular, de-facto monopoly, services and large edge NSPs are in a strong position in the market for end-to-end services, while transit NSPs can be relatively easily replaced. The apportionment of revenue from Internet users reflects to a large extent the market power of the value chain actors and not the inherent costs and investments required for the efficient support of Internet services, thus resulting in social welfare loss and ecosystem inefficiencies. The “design-for-tussle” principle [Clark05].is an attempt to balance market power, and should therefore be taken into account when designing new solutions and architectures.
Inefficient routing under congestion. Currently, the traffic is often routed inefficiently, as a result of desire for market power, lack of economic incentives combined with individual rationality of actors involved (e.g. hot-potato routing) or technical and business model deficiencies. Again, this leads to unpredictable quality, in particular with respect to latency under congested situations or network outage. High and low value traffic are treated the same and customers cannot expect to have their high value traffic protected. To cope with these problems, over-provisioning has often been used but this has resulted in limiting innovations and deployments of advanced features at the network infrastructure level. Moreover, over-provisioning of peering links is increasingly problematic with growing traffic in terms of who will cover the additional costs.
Inefficiency of application specific overlays. As a result of the above issues, application layer ad-hoc “fixes” and specific services have emerged (e.g. Content Delivery Networks, WAN acceleration, etc.). While these clearly show the demand for predictable quality levels and the need for specific services, the solutions do not in general utilize the network in an optimal way and application specific functionality is often inefficiently replicated.
B.
Recommendations and solution principles
Different stakeholders may assign different priorities to these issues, so a solution should as far as possible address all of them in order to be widely accepted. Focusing more specifically on coordination principles, the following requirements are proposed for buying and selling ASQ interconnection goods:
A common language for network quality to increase transparency and achieve economies of scale Common traffic charging principles (based on unidirectional flows in the network layer)
Propagation of information to facilitate route discovery and revenue sharing Avoidance of fragmentation while building trust between heterogeneous actors
Coordination of ASQ configuration across heterogeneous network while ensuring consistent end-to-end QoS.
An ASQ-enabled traffic exchange architecture should both increase external user welfare and internal system efficiency. As the overall solution principles and for the technical architecture, we recommend: 1) to design a simple approach with a limited set of quality parameters in order to take the initial steps and bootstrap a community for commercial ASQ traffic exchange. It should be based on bilateral agreements and existing route announcements between NSPs with a relatively high level of trust due to common interests,
2) to design for independent ASQ traffic routing in the two directions between two endpoints, with Sending Party Network Pays (SPNP, presented in next sections) as the foundation layer charging1,
3) to avoid automating the inter-NSP negotiation at the initial steps. Such automation should be limited to the ordering and establishment of ASQ paths under pre-negotiated pricing agreements, to avoid the risk of instabilities in a rising ASQ traffic exchange market. In latter and more mature ASQ markets, automated inter-NSP negotiation can lead to further optimization thanks to an healthy and dynamic competition among multiple ASQ path providers,
4) to complement the ETICS core functionality with session flow management in order to monetize the most valuable end-user or end-customer session flows for the retail market,
5) to focus on managed business connectivity services and provide standardized APIs for NSPs, business customers and other service providers willing to compose their own product offerings on top of the ASQ goods, and
6) to specify a monitoring system, along with a gradual roll out scenario, based on the assumption that each NSP will cover its own cost and use the system for its own benefit.
The roadmap towards higher levels of efficiency and welfare benefits should go through gradual public information exchanges in order to increase the wholesale market transparency. This can take the form of a single information-sharing federation between NSPs, while still keeping business decisions related to revenues and resource control at individual NSPs. In addition, monitoring efforts must be anchored in a commonly agreed risk perception. These recommendations apply to an ASQ interconnection market with its own business agreements, as a complement to the BE interconnection that will continue to exist for non QoS-assured traffic.
Finally, and as a longer term option, we recommend seeing business alliances as additional collaboration alternatives that may emerge in a mature ASQ market, probably within targeted service and application areas. Each alliance needs to be constructed based on specific principles for revenue sharing and resource specialization among actors and they will therefore have different growth opportunities and possibly compete with each other. In order to maintain a non-fragmented global ASQ infrastructure, such alliances should primarily operate above the network layer. However, this kind of application layer collaboration was
1
We however recognize that not all ASQ traffic exchange will allow easy identification of an initiator side willing to pay for both traffic directions.
out of scope of the project, while different community alternatives and collaboration modes were indeed addressed and are described in section E.
C.
Internet Neutrality
The topic of Net Neutrality has generated intense debates between all Internet stakeholders. In May 2012, the BEREC issued a document for public consultation [BoR(12)_33]. The review of research and literature studies conducted by ETICS indicated that no consensual conclusion has emerged by analyzing the potential positive or negative impacts of QoS and traffic management, thus motivating an answer to this hearing [ETICS12]. It is therefore reasonable to consider that network services with assured quality could foster market opportunities for many actors of the value chain and thus re-balance cost sharing. While we recognize possible risks associated to the ASQ introduction, we believe that the European market is already sufficiently regulated and monitored by customer associations to mitigate them, and the final decision will be from the market acceptance.
We also recommended that the regulatory stakeholders should focus on monitoring the Internet value chain as a whole and not a priori block innovation on premium services and associated NSP-to-NSP revenue sharing. Means should be allowed to support end-to-end fairness, predictability and a reasonable match between Internet resources that users consume and what-you-pay-for in terms of internet access and/or services. The attention should also be moved towards the wider scope of Internet Neutrality and all key actors in the value chain in order to maintain an open, transparent and non-discriminatory Internet at all levels. Indeed, the debate on the net(work) neutrality is biased by nature with only a small part of the respondents actually regulated.
Notably, we have observed a shift in recognition by the European Commission of the need of predictable QoE and assured service quality end-to-end. Citing the Commissioner and Vice President Neelie Kroes: “… And we should have consistent rules to safeguard the open internet, so bright ideas don't get blocked or throttled. But without banning premium services – so the sector can innovate to provide new ideas, and consumers have the chance to enjoy something extra” [KROES13]. In September 2013, the European commission has made regulatory proposals for a Connected Continent2, explicitly recognizing the opportunities for Assured Service Quality offers as one of the new source of growth and innovation in Europe, and which has to be in operation side-by-side with a well-functioning best-effort Internet access service. At the time of writing, it is too early to anticipate whether the text will be adopted by the European parliament; yet, the proposal is an important sign that could take away the uncertainty that is currently hampering the actors in desire of introducing end-to-end ASQ.
2
Business model proposals
As discussed in previous sections, the goal of the ETICS architecture is to provide coordination means to NSPs involved in the end-to-end connectivity in order to offer an end-to-end assured service quality.
ASQ interconnection is the core element of the ETICS value proposition, as a complement to existing peering and transit agreements, which can still apply to Best Effort Internet traffic. They have been designed with the intention to create a better balance between the actors in terms of revenue sharing and incentives for investments. Through ASQ interconnection the NSPs can offer new services to existing customers and reach additional customers outside their own network, e.g. enterprises and service providers. In particular, NSPs can offer new services demanding higher levels of network performance and quality assurance than what “best effort” can provide.
Facing the chicken-and-egg problem of coordination across multiple actors and across both wholesale and retail, the proposed solution elements and services as a whole provide answers to this problem. This is achieved by i) ASQ interconnection goods for wholesale between NSPs3, and ii) the concept of end-user ASQ connectivity for serving Internet end-points and end-customer or user session flows at the retail level, as introduced below.
The lack of ASQ market for the moment makes more difficult the definition of a perfect business model fulfilling all requirements from the beginning. We therefore first describe below the main services enabling the assured quality end-to-end, possible collaboration modes among NSPs, and the main charging principles. In these descriptions, we also start introducing the notions of bootstrapping providing coordinated motivation across a sufficient set of actors for initiating and taking the first steps, and of a roadmap where additional features and capabilities are added as the market matures. These concepts will be further elaborated in the “Technical proposals” section.
D.
Services that enable assured quality end-to-end
ASQ interconnection can be realized using two main service categories, namely ASQ paths and End-user ASQ connectivity. First, ASQ Paths correspond to long-lasting wholesale market services for transporting aggregate traffic. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the ASQ paths define their boundaries, the point of interconnects (PoIs) between two neighbour NSPs and their traffic identifiers. The SLAs support aggregated traffic services with specified availability and bandwidth at these PoIs. Guarantees for delay, jitter and packet loss can also be optionally added, as well as price information for automated service composition. ASQ paths can be divided into two sub-types depending on the connectivity degree of the service: i) an ASQ tunnel is defined between two PoIs, or from a PoI to an interconnection point with an enterprise network; ii) a
PoI2Region service is defined from a PoI to a set of destination end-points (thus defining a region, which could e.g. represent IP address ranges, a geographical area, business customers, or mobile customer end-points). Hence, the aggregated term ASQ path is used when referring to both ASQ tunnel and/or PoI2Region
services.
Figure 2-a illustrates examples of these two ASQ path services from the origin NSP A: an ASQ tunnel towards a remote enterprise network, and a PoI2Region service towards multiple addressable points in the region 2
3
of the NSP 2. The figure also shows that NSP A does not need to know all details of the ASQ path service: for example, the choice of the PoI between the NSP 1 and NSP 2 is left to these two interconnected NSPs.
Figure 2 -a: Example of ASQ Paths (ASQ Tunnel and PoI2Region)
Figure 2-b: Example end-user ASQ connectivity on top of ASQ PoI2Region service
Secondly, End-user ASQ connectivity corresponds to retail sessions at the end-customer demand time scale, which are realized “on-top-of” the existing ASQ paths. In this way the ASQ path avoids having state-awareness of End-user ASQ connectivity services, and the equipment managing these aggregate resources (e.g. AS border routers) only deal with the ASQ path level.
Figure 2-b illustrates aggregated PoI2Region services as well as three end-user ASQ connectivity services “on-top-of” the PoI2Region services. The transit NSP 1 has acquired two different PoI2Region services offered by NSP 2 (to “Region 2”) and one offered by NSP 3 (to “Region 3”). So, in addition to an offer to its local Region 1 (through PoI (c)), NSP 1 can offer to NSP A several aggregated PoI2Region services towards Region 2, Region 3 or a combination of the two (i.e. Region 4), through the PoI (a) and PoI (b) respectively. In addition, Figure 2-b also shows that specific traffic steering policies allows respectively the NSP A and the NSP 1 to force the upper end-user ASQ connectivity (from the source end-point in NSP A to the destination end-point in NSP 2) going through PoIs (a) and (d) respectively. Moreover, NSP 1 may also support end-user-traffic origination (towards region 3, through the PoI (f)).
Note that the composite PoI2Region services are typically realized by a composition of one or more ASQ tunnels in concatenation with one or more PoI2 Region services.
E.
Collaboration modes and communities
Facing the challenges of NSPs coordination, ETICS introduces two fundamental collaboration modes: The
bilateral cascading collaboration mode prescribes that NSPs can create new (composite) ASQ paths by concatenating their own network services (single-NSP ASQ paths) to one or more ASQ paths obtained from their neighbours. Later on, the coordinated ASQ composition collaboration mode enables NSPs to go beyond bilateral and enter into multi-party agreements about how to aggregate and compose ASQ paths; this has the advantage that routing can be based on more detailed, specific and dynamic information obtained from networks far away topologically.
In addition, three main types of ASQ interconnection communities are defined, each reflecting different amount of trust and cooperation among its participants, information sharing and level of business constraints, namely: i) Open Association (solely technical specifications and best practice directives), ii)
s1 sn (origin) Edge NSP A Transit NSP 1 ASQ Tunnel (dest) Edge NSP 2 d1 dm Region 2 PoI (NSP-NSP) PoI (NSP-enterprise) Entreprise
network Destination region PoI2Region service (origin) Edge NSP A b Transit NSP 1 (dest) Edges Region 4 Region 2 Region 3 Region 1 a c d e f NSP 2 NSP 3 End-user ASQ connectivity End-user ASQ connectivity source point
Federation (an additional level of information dissemination and common objectives, potentially common technical facilities for supporting functions), and iii) Alliance (adding common business policy rules directed by a defined market objective and revenue sharing).
While the bilateral cascading mode is associated with the open association, the coordinated ASQ composition mode will require the federation or alliance community type. For each of the three community types ETICS is proposing a set of detailed rules that should guide the deployment of the associated ETICS solution options [Del3.5].
We believe that the defined network services, charging principles, collaboration modes and community types together can enable the flexibility needed for the NSP to conduct their ASQ interconnection business according to their preferences. This flexible approach also satisfies the “design-for-tussle” objectives [Clark05].
F.
Charging principles
The ETICS charging principles are suited to services traded between NSPs for IP packet transport. These principles enable price and quality agreements, and as a result, revenue sharing that reflects the resources applied.
In this whitepaper we take a closer look at the fundamental charging approach proposed: the Sending Party Network Pays (SPNP) principle. By this principle, the buyer NSP of an ASQ path service pays for the traffic that he sends to the supplier NSP. Hence, the supplier NSP receiving IP packets gets compensated for transporting the packets until the destination with the desirable quality, similarly to a post mail packet delivery. For traffic in the opposite direction, the roles of A and B respectively will change, and the prices for the traffic in the two directions are in principle separate issues.
Figure 3: The Sending Party Network Pays principle
SPNP provides appropriate incentives to the supplier NSP to deliver the traffic according to the agreed SLA, while it also empowers the sender who best knows the quality to be given to different IP packets. We therefore consider the SPNP model as a prerequisite for the deployment of ASQ interconnection [Bornstaedt11]. A situation where the receiving party network pays for the general exchange of IP traffic would be counterproductive for the implementation of such interconnections. The sending party would have incentives to send packets in high quality classes and to charge the receiving party network in order to generate revenues.
A next roadmap step, as an extension of the basic SPNP, is the destination-based charging principle. This principle implements SPNP in the context of PoI2Region services and can also be used in the wholesale market including not only customer NSPs but also customer Content and Application Providers (CAP). It allows the supplier NSP to charge independently for different destination regions whether they belong to its own network or networks beyond it. Moreover, different prices can be applied to the PoIs from where the traffic enters its network. This differentiated pricing model takes distance-related costs into account.
NSP A NSP B IP packets Money Point(s) of Interconnect
However, its implementation is more complex than the basic SPNP approach. These two charging principles will generally work in a cascaded fashion both for PoI2Region services and ASQ tunnel services. The buyer NSP pays for the whole service and in case of more than two NSPs, each downstream supplier NSP involved in the chain pays further downstream to his selected supplier NSP(s).
Beyond the short term, it may be desirable to better select the end-to-end route and avoid uncontrolled myopic cascaded route selection [Roughgarden07]. Additional coordinated ASQ composition modes are therefore envisaged to optimize the creation of ASQ paths. Such advanced modes rely on the creation of an abstracted inter-domain topology including QoS information, and impose participating NSPs to disseminate information on their potential ASQ path segments. These modes allow a better load balancing in the network, thus also participating to a better revenue sharing among NSPs, and will be particularly adapted to enforce routing constraints with geographical requirements, thanks to the complete visibility on the traversed domains.
These collaboration models are elaborated in section I, but a specific illustration is described in the above figure to better explain the money flow. Figure 4-a shows an option where the customer-facing (primary) NSP sells the composite ASQ path as the initiator and the orchestrator of this composite ASQ path, thanks to the knowledge gained from the abstracted inter-domain topology. The charging principle consists in having the demanding NSP (NSP A) compensating the selling NSPs (NSPs 1 and 2) for provided path segments. The charging mechanism slightly differs from the SPNP principle (Figure 4-b), although the transaction still represents the payment by the initiating NSP for sending traffic with agreed ASQ characteristics.
Figure 4-a: charging principle in a coordinated mode Figure 4-b: charging principle in a bilateral cascading mode
While SPNP is proposed as the foundation layer for charging of PoI2Region services, there is also a need to enable the end-customer facing (edge) NSP to pay for the traffic in both directions for a given end-user ASQ connectivity service. This allows an edge NSP to offer new retail services and business models. In this case, the Initiating Party Network Pays (IPNP) on-top-of SPNP may solve the problem of distributing the total value received from the end-user’s consumption of content and services4. In addition, a variety of application level charging schemes are anticipated to complement the traffic layer charging enabled by the ETICS charging principles above. This allows the edge NSP facing the end-customer (eyeball NSP) to dynamically fit application level charging mechanism to local market or individual demands.
This combination of traffic level and application level charging schemes will enable a variety of feasible end-to-end business models. We expect that such new business models will enable revenue sharing that better reflects the resources applied as compared with what is currently enabled by the existing best-effort Internet business models.
4
See [Del2.3] for more details (origin) Edge NSP A Transit NSP 1 (dest) Edge NSP 2
ASQ path segment # 1
€ € (origin) Edge NSP A Transit NSP 1 (dest) Edge NSP 2
ASQ path segment # 1
Technical proposals
The main goal of the ETICS technical proposals is to allow ASQ-enabled NSPs to offer and exchange information on possible Assured Service Quality (ASQ) paths that they each can provide in order to accommodate the ASQ connectivity demands from their retail or wholesale customers (Figure 2-a and Figure 2-b). Interacting through a portal (Figure 5-a), the “ETICS customers”5 (an NSP, a CAP, or a large Enterprise) can request an ASQ path to transport aggregated traffic with QoS constraints (availability, delay, packet loss rate, etc.) or routing constraints.
From a technical point of view, the ETICS core system must solve several key issues:
Discovery & Knowledge of NSPs’ capabilities inside the community. If for a bilateral cascading mode, a neighbouring relation is sufficient, NSPs need to discover the network capabilities or offers of remote NSPs in a coordinated composition mode. Beyond known technical limitations when considering QoS extensions to BGP, proposals for modifying BGP for distributing the required information to a large number of NSPs in order to create ASQ services in a coordinated way, are generally facing strong opposition from people operating border routers, as well as from people defending the stable BGP operation defined at the IETF.
Enforce the route inside each network involved in the ASQ path. Once the service composition is done, the ASQ path must be instantiated. As this ASQ is not necessarily following the default Best Effort route computed by BGP, each NSP must enforce the configuration to route IP packets associated with the ASQ in such way that packets follow the sequence of domains computed by the service composition.
Coordinate ASQ setup across heterogeneous networks. As the ETICS solution enables each NSP to implement the ASQ with the mechanism they have already deployed or will deploy, the framework will ensure the continuity in the ASQ configuration across the different networks and underlying technologies. Currently, only BGP are allowed on inter-domain links, so that the solution must circumvent this restriction.
Operational and maintenance of ASQ paths. Once setup, the ASQ path must be monitored in order to verify that the QoS commitments are respected. In case of failure, it should also allow to detect where the problem is located, so as to repair it and eventually determine which NSP(s) will get the resulting penalties.
Figure 5-a: Portal to offer and manage ASQ paths Figure 5-b: Information exchange among the NSPs to find and establish a suitable ASQ path
5
“ETICS customer” is an actor role as indicated. This is a customer of an NSP (potentially a virtual NSP) that is part of a community of one of the kinds suggested by the ETICS proposal. See Section E for further explanation.
Community of NSPs offering ASQ paths Connect
Connect Connect Connect to to to to portalportalportalportal
Get information ASQ path request N offers Order ETICS customers
(NSPs, CAPs, Business Cust.)
NSP 1
NSP 3 NSP 2
NSP 4 Service and Business plane entities
1 1 1 1 2 5 3 4 1 2 5 3 4
Per-NSP ASQ path exchanges ETICS customer E2E request E2E ASQ path proposal to the customer E2E ASQ path composition
Additional information query to NSPs (opt.)
The following sections describe the ETICS core system designed to solve these 4 major issues. The solution relies on the introduction of a Network Service and Business Plane (NSBP) on top of the control, management and data planes of each NSP. The NSBP allows this coordination to take place as an overlay thus maintaining confidentiality on each NSP’s internal topology, as NSPs expose only Points of Interconnect (PoIs) and ASQ path services with QoS attributes (Figure 5-b, step 1). When receiving a customer request (step 2), the ETICS core system computes an ASQ path satisfying the QoS and economic criteria of the customer (step 3). In case additional information is required, the NSPs are polled during an optional step (step 4). Then, one or several offers are sent to the ETICS customer (step 5) who can decide to order an offer or not. Accordingly, the NSBP coordinates the different control planes of each NSP involved in the ASQ Path in order to enforce the connectivity service in their respective network, thus guaranteeing the end-to-end QoS.
The general ETICS framework is designed to accommodate all the collaboration modes anticipated by the project. In the following, this framework is further detailed for each specific mode, taking into account the different constraints and settings, and deriving how NSBP elements can be mapped onto the involved NSPs.
G.
“Bootstrapping” and short term
Business Internet services and business cloud connectivity comprise a growing market in the years to come and inter-NSP ASQ connectivity services may be needed to release the potentials of such services. ETICS is proposing use cases (for instance TelePresence, Software or Infrastructure as a Services -SaaS or IaaS) based on simple bilateral agreements between pairs of edge NSPs that can motivate the initial ETICS rollout steps and the “bootstrapping” of ASQ interconnection services. As a large part of Internet traffic is exchanged involving only two NSPs, so although simple, this case could represent important business opportunities.
For example, a business customer needs an ASQ connectivity to (from) a cloud provider whose data centre is attached to a remote edge NSP (Figure 6). The Cloud Service Broker (CSB) acts here as a one-stop-shop and service integrator towards the business customer. The CSB role can be an independent actor or be an additional role of the Cloud Provider or one of
NSP.
While the business drivers for such services are expected to be sufficient for the initial establishment of bilateral ASQ interconnection agreements, several business strategic, competition and market issues must be considered for the different actor roles. The services and functionality needed between the two edge NSPs (E1) as well as between the CSB and the customer-facing edge NSP (E7’)6 are in focus in this context7. The two NSPs need to establish in a reciprocal way, the PoI2Region services in each direction at an agreed set of PoIs. This enables one-way traffic termination to a destination region as defined by the agreement
6 For a complete presentation of the ETICS reference points see [Del.4.4]
7
Assuming initially a vertical integration between the CSB and the business customer facing edge NSP would simplify matters and lower the hurdles to enable a successful bootstrapping.
Business Customer Cloud Service Broker Cloud Provider Edge NSP Edge NSP External actor ETICS provider
ETICS assumptions and recommendations ETICS requirements and specification scope Solid line: ASQ traffic and associated SLA management
Dashed line: B2B enablement of end-user ASQ connectivity instances E7’
E1
(e.g. a set of IP prefixes or the AS number of the NSP) under the sending party network pays (SPNP) charging regime, as described above. The technical agreement should remain minimal in this initial phase for ASQ interconnection, i.e. the ASQ interconnection should be deployed on top of the existing (Best Effort) BGP route. It should also simply announce the DiffServ codepoint8 selected by the sender network for a proper IP packet treatment in the receiver network. Such simple NSP-to-NSP agreement, with a minimal coordination with the CSB to ensure that the related end-points have sufficient ASQ access capabilities and local SLAs, may be enough for proper end-to-end ASQ connectivity handling at this stage. Yet, it may not be sufficient to avoid the involved NSPs over-provisioning their networks.
To avoid such limitation while facilitating assured end-user services on-demand with strict guarantees, ETICS proposed, in addition to the core functionalities, service enhancement functions that enable simple control of specific end-user ASQ connectivity instances. These so-called Service Enhancement Functional Area (SEFA) capabilities can enable the business customer to request (via the CSB) ASQ connectivity on-demand. Details on SEFA can be found in the section J. Applied to the short term needs for cloud services, as a first step, the system should facilitate over E7’ the interrogation of the provisioned ASQ capabilities at a specific receiving end-point of a business customer. This can for instance be information on supported SLA properties given a specific source IP address of a datacentre. The next step can be to enable specific request for assured bandwidth on-demand, which can enable the business end-customer facing NSP to dynamically provision explicit resource and admission control policies at the access router. Proposed agreements can also open up for additional use cases and ASQ traffic enabling consumer Internet services, such as on-line gaming and off-net content delivery, e.g. for live events or for roaming customers.
H.
Bilateral Cascading Mode
The approach outlined above for initial inter-NSP ASQ bilateral agreements can be applied also for transit traffic. Extending the bilateral agreements in next steps by allowing ASQ traffic exchange in a cascading fashion along the current BGP-announced routes, it will be possible to send ASQ traffic across multiple networks. As discussed in the section G, this approach requires that the core and interconnect segments are well dimensioned, and that SEFA capabilities are introduced at the level of the access router to manage the provisioning of the required resource and admission control policies. The latter will enable proper resource handling at the access and aggregation segments, which are the segments that are more likely to be congested. As for the simple bilateral case, destination-based charging and IPNP on-top-of SPNP charging can be introduced for new innovative services and business models.
This basic BGP-based routing approach will select a given exit PoI for a given IP destination for any type of traffic, but does not rely on special routes for the ASQ traffic. However, the approach can be extended to enable local NSP traffic steering decisions (a.k.a. policy routing) so that a non-nearest and a more optimal PoI can be selected9.
When the number of ASQ path instances as well as the level of dynamicity increases, the need for further automating inter-NSP ASQ negotiations will soon become an issue and more sophisticated features of the ETICS core system for the efficient routing and provisioning of inter-carrier ASQ paths will be required. While the bilateral (static or automated) cascading agreements is expected to cope with most of the inter-NSP traffic in the short and medium term, additional capabilities are expected to become more attractive as the market expands and matures [Del2.3].
8
RFC 2474
9
I.
Coordinated Composition Mode
Cascaded agreements may lead to sub-optimal solutions as of their myopic nature, and the benefits of end-to-end ASQ traffic may be increased by introducing more “coopetition10” among NSPs. The figure 5-b in the previous section illustrated the information exchange among NSPs in order to find a suitable inter-carrier ASQ path. NSPs can define their own services (ASQ paths here) either pro-actively, thanks to a good knowledge of their network infrastructure and of the customer demands, or on-demand, to best fit an offer with a specific customer demand. This dual approach is taken into account in the ETICS core system with the “Push” and “Pull” options: when customer demands are stable, NSP can pre-built offers and expose these offers to other NSPs, according to their publication policies. The offers are stored (“pushed”) in ASQ catalogues and composed with other NSPs’ offers previously exchanged, when receiving a customer request for an end-to-end ASQ path. Yet, NSPs can also build offers when receiving the demand: the offer is thus “pulled”. In this case, instead of exchanging offers, NSPs exchange “network capabilities”, i.e. aggregated QoS information per NSP domain, allowing to contact only relevant NSPs to get a consolidated offer compliant with the current network status (step 4 in figure 5-b). Once the offer has been accepted by the customer, each selected NSP has to activate the service and ensure that network equipments are configured to guarantee the contracted SLA parameters. Then, the ASQ path is generally monitored, to check that QoS metrics are respected, and it is finally terminated either as it expired or on the demand of the customer. The other important dimension is to whom the information of each NSP is sent, i.e. how the Network Service and Business Plane entities of the figure 5-b are implemented.
Pre-built offers stored in each local NSP’s service catalogue, can be pushed to a neutral third party facilitator, to other NSPs of the community, or just to neighbour NSPs for a cascaded operation (Figure 7-a,b,c respectively).
In the pull mode, offers are built on demand: NSPs exchange network capabilities instead of pre-built offers, to inform others NSPs of the type of performance they can generally assure in their respective networks, so that they can later be contacted to propose an offer contributing to an end-to-end ASQ path. This model is therefore generally distributed, and offers are built on-demand and in cascade between the NSPs (Figure 7-d).
As it may be difficult for NSPs to pre-compute their offers due to the current lack of knowledge on possible customer requests in an emerging ASQ market, the pull implementation may be more suitable in early stage of collaborations among NSPs. Gaining in maturity and trust, the solutions could progressively deploy the push model to meet most frequent customer requests, while continuing to compute tailor-made offers on-demand for more specific requests.
10
Coopetition means that NSPs are both cooperating and competing to find the best trade-off between their own interest and the maximization of the global inter-NSP ASQ revenues.
Figure 7: Fully centralized (a), per-NSP centralized (b) and distributed (c) push models; (d) Distributed pull models
The ETICS Network Service and Business plane includes the processes required in these collaboration models (Figure 8). The core architecture is based around four new building blocks and two standards ones11:
The SLA offers (Push) block manages all functions (build, control and publish) of the “Push” model. It interacts with other NSBP entities through the E1/E1-B business interface in order to exchange SLA offers and complete its offers DataBase (DB). It gets information from the Business & Policy blocks to make offers and provides them to the SLA Manager for the Service Composition.
The Business & Policy rules block is the central feature for managing the policy, charging and business of the NSP. All policies are stored in a local database and govern the behaviour of the other blocks. It also ensures the Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) for security and billing purposes.
The SLA Manager owns the Service Composition, Validation, Termination and Service Assurance functions and acts as the Orchestrator of the ASQ delivery. It has links with all others blocks including the network for the ASQ enforcement via the Service Instance Manager and Monitoring. It also interacts with other NSBP entities through the E1/E2-S service interface when it processes an ASQ service request.
The Network Capabilities (Pull) block manages all functions of the “Pull” model. It starts by acquiring network topology, in order to compute resulting network capabilities and exchange them through the E1/E2-B business interface.
The Path Computation Element (PCE) is the standard IETF block with a few enhancements in order to take into account new QoS (i.e. delay, jitter loss) and Business (i.e. price, optional) parameters to perform the initial phase of the ASQ path computation. It is triggered by the SLA Manager to complete the service composition in “Push” mode or to perform the service composition in “Pull” mode. In this case, it takes complementary information from the Network Capabilities block to determine the AS path. It interacts with the other NSBP entities through the E1/E2-C control
interface.
11
The E1/E2 interfaces relate to NSP-to-NSP interactions, while the E6/E7 interfaces relate to NSP-to-CAP/Enterprise customer interaction. See [D4.4] for more information and a full description of the processes.
NSP 1 NSP 3 NSP 2 NSP 4 Third party Facilitator 1 1 1 1 2 4 3 5 1 2 5 3 4
Network service offers publication Inter-Carrier ASQ path request
IC ASQ path proposal to the customer Inter-Carrier ASQ path composition
Customer ordering 6
7 7
Network path computation (opt.) Network path provisioning 6 8 Monitoring/Maintaining/Terminating NSP 1 NSP 3 NSP 2 NSP 4 2 6 4 1 3 5 2 4
Network capabilities exchange (distributed)
Deduce own budget, send offer requests to NSPs
Inter-Carrier ASQ path request
7 7
Network path computation (opt.) Network path provisioning 6 8 Monitoring/Maintaining/Terminating 3 1 1 1 1 NSP chain computation
Could be done backward-recursive (PCE/BRPC-like)
4’ 5
6 Customer ordering
IC ASQ path proposal to the customer
9
Destination, 100Mbits, 100ms Destination, 100Mbits, 30ms Destination, 100Mbits, 10ms NSP 1 NSP 3 NSP 2 NSP 4 NSP1 Facilit. 1 1 1 2 4 3 5 1 2 5 3 4
Network service offers publication Inter-Carrier ASQ path request
IC ASQ path proposal to the customer Inter-Carrier ASQ path composition
Customer ordering 6
7 7
Network path computation (opt.) Network path provisioning 6 8 Monitoring/Maintaining/Terminating NSP 1 NSP 3 NSP 2 NSP 4 1 3 4 5 1 2 5 3 4
Network service offers publication Offers aggregation and new propagation
IC ASQ path proposal to the customer Inter-Carrier ASQ path request
Customer ordering 6
7 7
Network path computation (opt.) Network path provisioning 6 8Monitoring/Maintaining/Terminating 2 2 a) b) c) d)
ETICS User Interface corresponds to the Web portal used by any ETICS customers to make an ASQ request.
Figure 8: ETICS Network Service and Business Plane processes, on top of the Control and Data planes of NSPs
To ease the core system specification and demonstrate its feasibility, most building blocks and protocols have been implemented in an interconnected multi-partner lab-environment. The control and data planes available in the bed realistically represent a multi-vendor and multi-carrier environment, successfully validating the Network Service and Business plane concept.
J.
Enabling End-User ASQ Connectivity Services
In addition to the provisioning of the inter-carrier ASQ paths, the ETICS core system can be extended with features enabling end-user ASQ connectivity, which allows more personalized Quality of Experience. The ETICS Service Enhancement Functional Area (SEFA) provides a system solution space for developing specific retail level services based on established ASQ connectivity. The SEFA interacts with other ETICS planes (data, control, monitoring, network service and business, and management) in order to manage service specific parameters and actions, at different locations and for different actors (Figure 9).
The chosen use case example envisages a premium business internet service provisioning on-top-of pre-existing ASQ paths, as introduced in Section G above. The figure illustrates how an end-user ASQ connectivity service, from a Content and Application Provider (CAP) (e.g. cloud provider) attached to NSP 1 towards a business end-user located in the NSP 2, can be supported by the SEFA approach.
TED Offers DB
SLA Offers (Push)
•Builders
•Controller
•Publish
Routing & Topology Monitoring Service Instance
Manager
NC DB
Network Capabilities (Pull)
•IC Routing Controller
•IC Routing protocol Rules & Bill
DB SLA DB
Business & Policy
•AAA •Billing •Policy Rules Network Service Provider PCE E6/E7 E1/E2-S E1/E2-B E1/E2-C
E1/E2-B ETICS User Interface
SLA Offers
Policy Rules
AAA
Policy & Bill
SLA Manager •Service Composition •Validation •Termination •Service Assurance Traffic Engineering
Figure 9: Example of possible locations of SEFA functionalities
The end-user application will indirectly invoke a SEFA function at the CAP side which is interacting over interface E7' with the SEFA function at the NSP 2 side. This enables to coordinate the end-user expectations with the end-user specific policies at the NSP 2 and the corresponding policies at the CAP side. Note that SEFA features, for end-user policies and capability enforcement, are not managed at the PoIs (a, d, and e), which only deal with ASQ paths.
The variety of possible SEFA use cases depends on the creativeness of network and application service providers. Examples of SEFA use cases are for instance and among others:
Application service related QoS/QoE monitoring based on network performance, e.g. observing selected network segments to provide information to align the service quality with the application requirements,
Derivation of context information (e.g. device capabilities) to enhance the application service quality delivery to users in conjunction with e.g. application control functionalities, such as media adaptation. Implementation of charging principles based on specific SEFA functionalities to perform use case related policing and accounting, e.g. according to the IPNP on-top-of SPNP principle (see above). Enablers for targeted and service-specific alliances consisting of e.g. network and application providers in order to create new service bundles for e.g. video and music services.
As an example of use case, the SEFA-Graceful Denial of Service (GDoS) [Del4.4, Del5.7] enables an “engaged” signal for IP-based services considering available resources in the user access network and the application service requirements which are needed to deliver the service with a satisfying quality. The intention of SEFA-GDoS is not to influence the application service delivery process itself, but rather to provide an application quality indication (AQI) feedback to the user. The SEFA-Reimburse [Del3.5] can complement the SEFA-GDoS introducing a partial refund to the user when the targeted quality is not met. This also improves the trust between the user and the seller, eventually increasing the seller’s revenue. In addition, the SEFA-Virtual Private Network (VPN) [Del3.5, Del5.8] architecture enables the instantiation of Layer 2 and Layer 3 BGP/MPLS VPNs on top of aggregate ASQ paths. This is achieved by building on the underlying baseline mechanisms of ETICS for the establishment of the inter-domain paths to carry the tunnelled VPN traffic.
Content and Application Provider (CAP) b Transit NSP 1 (dest) Edges Region 2 Region 3 a c d e f NSP 2 NSP 3
End-user ASQ connectivity End-user ASQ connectivity source point End-user ASQ connectivity dest. point
End-user
SEFA-CAP
SEFA-NSP 2
SEFA Service Enhancement Functional Area SEFA interaction (E7’)
SEFA functionality (e.g. policy enforcement)
Conclusion
This whitepaper has pointed out several challenges facing the network and Internet industry. The end-customers are facing unpredictable Quality of Experience (QoE) and lack of support of assured service quality across the Internet. Many Internet actors struggle with the current wholesale offerings and business models, and are lacking a more efficient alignment of investment incentives and revenue sharing. As a result we observe more and more disputes among the actors, which create a vicious circle keeping high quality and new innovative value propositions out of the market.
The ETICS project has developed recommendations that we believe are key to move beyond the current situation towards a direction that is beneficial for the Internet ecosystem as a whole. The ETICS solution, briefly presented above, proposes assured service quality (ASQ) interconnection offerings and the Sending Party Network Pays (SPNP) principle for NSP-to-NSP ASQ IP traffic exchange. From this basis we suggest that a variety of retail business models can be established (“on-top-of SPNP”) to enable inter-carrier ASQ connectivity services for the future needs of the end-customers.
Technically, ETICS suggests the use of a Network and Service Business Plane (NSBP) working in overlay to heterogeneous technologies used by the NSPs in their domain, as well as between domains. The feasibility of such plane has been proven within an interconnected test bed including control and data planes from multiple vendors, and realistically representing a multi-carrier environment. The tool-kit of technical solutions provided in the ETICS framework allows for different deployment scenarios matching the various business and technical profiles of NSPs. Finally, we have suggested a roadmap to lower the entry barriers for initial and short term solution steps as well as more advance collaboration and optimization features that will improve overall efficiency as the market matures and grows.
In the light of the multi-faceted challenges confronting the industry, we believe that the ETICS solution proposal summarized in this whitepaper can contribute to the establishment of next steps for the industry in a way that can benefit and create value for all Internet end-customers as well as the industry actors. The recent common European regulatory framework draft proposal from the European commission and their support of ASQ connectivity or “Specialized services” provide an important sign to the industry actors, indicating that ETICS proposals are matching current market opportunities, and suggest that time has come to take initial steps to implement inter-carrier assured service quality products.
K.
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[Del5.7] ETICS Deliverable D5.7, “Final release of selected components for the Inter-Carrier Service Delivery”, May 2013
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[Wahlmueller12] Wahlmueller, S. Zwickl, P. and Reichl, P.: “Pricing and regulating quality of experience”. Next Generation Internet (EURO-NGI) conference, June 2012, pp. 57-64
Athens University of Economics and Business Technion IMPRINT
Full project title: Economics and Technologies for Inter Carrier Services
Document title: ETICS White Paper
Editor: Nicolas Le Sauze, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France Project Co-ordinator: Nicolas Le Sauze, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France
Technical Project Leader: Richard Douville, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France
This project is co-funded by the European Union through the ICT programme under FP7, GA n°248567
