Latest: After a year of defining the QoS model and understanding the complexities involved with the deployment and maintenance of QoS services, participants in the JANET QoS Development Project and JANET(UK) have concluded that production QoS services will not be provided across JANET in the foreseeable future. The conclusion assumes that the overprovisioned core of JANET will be kept QoS transparent, allowing regional and campus network operators to deploy QoS through JANET on a case by case basis if they decide to do so. The recommendations and technical guidance focusing on access links between regional networks and JANET connected organisations where QoS might be needed will be produced by the project participants during the remaining term of the project, which is till the end of November 2007. The full statement about JANET(UK) position regarding QoS on JANET is available. The presentation about the state of the JANET QoS Developmnt project given at Networkshop 35 on 4th April 2007 by Victor Olifer is here.
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Quality of Service (QoS) is a technology that counters the effects of congestion and queues in packet-switched networks, at the same time keeping the advantages of those networks such as high throughput and dynamic re-allocation of bandwidth between users. QoS divides network traffic into different classes during periods of congestion, and processes those classes in different ways depending upon their characteristics.
A more detailed overview of QoS technology is available.
The JANET QoS Development Project began in 2002 with the goal of assessing the benefits of QoS on JANET in a multi-domain and multi-vendor environment for a range of production applications. Phase 1 of the project showed some obvious benefits of this approach for such popular services as Videoconferencing and Voice over IP, but it also showed that provisioning a QoS service would be a major challenge.
Phase 2 of the project was established in November 2005 primarily to investigate the feasibility of QoS production services for the JANET community. The focus of Phase 2 is on developing a generic QoS service model that may create a basis for stable, consistent and maintainable QoS service across the JANET core and regional networks.
In March 2006, Phase 2 participants produced a Network Performance Survey that aimed to provide up-to-date information about the JANET community's requirements for network performance and check it against the project objectives and plans. The results of the survey are available.
