JANET QoS DEVELOPMENT PROJECT HISTORY

JANET(UK) formed a QoS Think Tank in January 2001, which involved representatives from the academic community, industry, research, JISC and JANET(UK).

The JANET QoS Development Project was set up in January 2002 as part of the SuperJANET4 development programme, "to create a roadmap for the development of network QoS." The project followed the recommendations of the QoS Think Tank, which accumulated the expertise of the JANET community in the QoS area.

In November 2002, JANET engineers conducted a risk analysis on the deployment of QoS on the JANET backbone. The results of the analysis were reported in ‘IP Premium risk management issues for Regional Networks’, which highlighted potential risks to JANET production services following the deployment of QoS.

During the first quarter of 2003, JANET engineers completed an exercise on the JANET backbone which involved the measurement of existing traffic classes. Similar instrumentation exercises were also conducted during summer 2003 by several project participants. The exercise helped the project partners to gain an insight into the actual amount of QoS-marked traffic on JANET and gain first-hand experience with QoS-related functions within routers and switches. The results of the instrumentation exercise revealed that the main percentage of traffic in all instrumented parts of JANET was BE traffic (around 97%-99%) with a very small percentage of IP Premium and LBE traffic.

In summer 2003, work commenced on configuring the JANET backbone and the Regional and Campus Networks of each project participant to support IP Premium, BE and LBE QoS services. It was done in two stages. First, policing on the access links of the participating networks was activated, protecting them from the potential threat of regular traffic being completely pre-empted by prioritised IP Premium traffic. The second stage involved activating differentiated queuing, when it was clear that policing worked properly and the respective areas of JANET were supporting the three planned classes of traffic.

Configuration on the JANET backbone was completed in November 2003 and the Regional and Campus Networks in January 2004. By February 2004, a Test Plan had been developed and agreed. This described the different types of local and global tests to be conducted within the project, with the aim of exploring the effects of QoS on selected applications. The project partners conducted local QoS tests during February 2004.

In March 2004, three main tests were carried out across JANET during the JANET at-risk period slots.The test results proved the benefits of QoS services for the selected applications.

At the final partner meeting that was held in June 2004, it was agreed that the work done as a part of the Project was useful; and the recommendation was made that Phase 2 of the JANET QoS Development Project be defined, addressing the introduction of QoS services in a JANET production environment.