2014 · 25 citations · 0 references
Abstract: To sustain inter-carrier QoS assurance needed by future applications, the Internet has to evolve along two main axes: i) the study, design and implementation of new business models to foster investments, and ii) the introduction of new archi-tectures and protocols to overcome current technical impediments. This paper pre-sents the vision of the FP7 project ETICS (Economics and Technologies for Inter-Carrier Services) which aims at reshaping the current ecosystem and designing a new framework, thus contributing coherently to both axes. ETICS addresses issues at dif-ferent levels of network control/management: on the top, enhanced Operational Sup-port Systems (OSSs) of network providers will interact to negotiate and commit QoS agreements; at an intermediate level, Network Management Systems (NMSs) will be strengthened to support complex configuration policing; at the control plane level, protocols will be augmented with new features allowing soft or strict QoS assurance.