Investigating the Potential of the Inter-IXP Multigraph for the Provisioning of Guaranteed End-to-End Services

TL;DR

This paper explores leveraging the inter-IXP multigraph, a novel Internet topology abstraction, to enable guaranteed end-to-end services through path stitching, enhancing connectivity, diversity, and QoS management.

Contribution

It introduces the inter-IXP multigraph abstraction, maps and evaluates its potential, and develops algorithms for path stitching to improve guaranteed service provisioning.

Findings

Inter-IXP multigraph offers high path diversity.

Path stitching on this graph can enhance guaranteed end-to-end services.

The proposed framework demonstrates promising potential for Internet-wide QoS provisioning.

Abstract

In this work, we propose utilizing the rich connectivity between IXPs and ISPs for inter-domain path stitching, supervised by centralized QoS brokers. In this context, we highlight a novel abstraction of the Internet topology, i.e., the inter-IXP multigraph composed of IXPs and paths crossing the domains of their shared member ISPs. This can potentially serve as a dense Internet-wide substrate for provisioning guaranteed end-to-end (e2e) services with high path diversity and global IPv4 address space reach. We thus map the IXP multigraph, evaluate its potential, and introduce a rich algorithmic framework for path stitching on such graph structures.