The future Generalized Access Network has a common infrastructure supporting multiple radio interface technologies through which mobile hosts, mobile ad-hoc, PN (Personal Networks), PAN (Personal Area Networks), MAN (Metropolitan Area Networks), and moving networks (Mobile Networks)
will be attached.
Such a GAN requires new mobility aware protocols for signaling information, (e.g., QoS, AAA) about a data flow along its path in the network.
The IETF Next Steps in Signaling (NSIS) working group is considering such protocols and provides a model for the network entities that take part in such signaling and the relationship between signaling and the rest of the network operation.
The NSIS overall protocol suite is decomposed into a generic (lower) layer denoted as NSIS Transport Layer Protocol (NTLP), with a separate upper layer for each signaling application denoted as NSIS Signaling Layer Protocol (NSLP).
The QoS-NSLP protocol establishes and maintains states at nodes along the path of a data flow, for the purpose of providing some forwarding resources for that flow. However, this resource provisioning can only be accomplished using QoS Signaling Policies (QSPs). Such a QSP is the Resource Management
in Diffserv (RMD)-QSP that is used to provide dynamic resource management within Diffserv. The RMD-QSP and the QoS-NSLP protocol layer are currently
standardized in the IETF NSIS working group, see:
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/nsis-charter.html.
The main goal of this assignment is to design and implement the RMD QSP and the QoS NSIS Signaling Layer Protocol (QoS-NSLP) functionalities that are required by this QSP. One of the starting points that could be used during the realization of this assignment is the RMD-RSVP protocol implementation described in the M. Sc. Thesis of Patrick Goering published by the University of Twente. RSVP is the abbreviation of Resource Reservation
Protocol. Another starting point that could be used during the realization of this assignment is the Linux implementation of the Cross-Application
Signaling Protocol (CASP) protocol and its QoS resource reservation client,
see: http://user.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/~casp/