QoS from the Gigapop to the Desktop

1. QoS from the Gigapop to the Desktop • The Campus Context; Planning Assumptions - kjk • Technical Issues and Alternatives - teg • Strawman Approach; Technical Implementation Issues - teg • Economic and Policy Implementation Issues - kjk

2. Campus Technical Contexts • As many as 50% of campus desktop connections are not centrally managed • Large R1’s use many desktop communications technologies • Less than 25% of the R1’s currently have authentication

3. University Economic Contexts • Yearly budget cycles require defined levels of expenditure on datacommunications • Lots of “funny money” economies • Indirect costs mechanisms add complexity and limit flexibility • Datacommunications sometimes operates as an auxiliary, sometimes general fund, usually hybrid • Grants generally support one-time costs, not continuing costs

4. Campus Political Contexts • Programmatic goals drive actions • Obligation to maintain a commons • Sharp distinctions of haves and have-nots caused by granting opportunities • Traditional concerns about equity • Dispersed locations, on campus and off • Typically loose authority over departments and colleges • “The academy” is slow to change

5. We Need Guidance from Above • OS • What levels (discrete or continuous ) of QoS can the OS request? • How adaptive can the OS be? • Apps • Will adaptive applications be widespread? • What types of data flows will applications generate? • What QoS characteristics do apps care about? • Users • Will they accept soft guarantees? • How do they want QoS to be allocated?

6. We Need Guidance from Below • What will closet switches provide for QoS and signalling? • What will ISP’s be offering as premium commodity Internet? How will the service be priced? • How will Abilene offer premium service? Will premium service and best-effort coexist on the same “channel”? • Will premium service be statically or dynamically provisioned?

7. Three Last-Mile Instances for QoS • University • Corporate • Residential

8. Commonalities about QoS Instances • All will need common understandings of service levels • All want audit capabilities • All have remote users on the road that might want QoS • All need standard interface for QoS requests

9. Differences about QoS Instances • Budgetary issues and use of pricing mechanisms • The need for end-end authentication and the tools available • Privacy and security iissues with QoS • Firewalls and address translation • The likely applications and their characteristic dataflows

10. Assumptions • Simplicity for reliability and operational costs • Overprovisioning on campus appears tractable; although some congestion points may arise. • External QoS may well be scarce; reservations may be needed for uses that represents a significant percentage of overall external capacity • If the equipment can provide differentiated services, we should use those capacities, albeit simply • At a minimum, wide-area usage costs should be known to the user; we need to educate demand • Legacy systems and apps must be accomodated

11. The Campus QoS Toolkit • Traffic authorization (premium access demand control) • Eligibility Control • Admission Control • Traffic modification (instantenous demand control) • Traffic shaping • Traffic policing • Traffic adaptation (feedback-based demand control) • Protocol Adaptation • Application adaptation • User adaptation (behavior shaping)

12. Strawman Economic and Policy Issues • How do we handle subscriptions? • How does this model work for users? • How do we handle non-central networks? • If we do reserve external QoS, how do we do it? • If we do schedule external QoS, how do we do it? • How to control use of external QoS? • How do we fund this? • What are the cost accounting and cost recovery issues?

13. How do we handle subscriptions? • What can we charge? What parts of the cost do we recover? Who can we charge? • How do we do subscriptions at the many institutions that do not charge for networking? • Subcriptions are not for “somewhat better performance” but for “different applications to be functional”; will invoke equity issues • How many premium ports do we “sell”; is it a pure marketplace or do allocate coupons to buy? How do we market the service? • Where will we need multiple backbones and ribs? What are the funding and fiber consequences? • Where do we install premium commons - eg classrooms, conference rooms….

14. How does this model work for users? • Is the model clear to lay people? Will the lack of end-end guarantees be an issue? • What political issues do subcriptions raise? • What interfaces do users see? • How can we serve the itinerant user? • How will network externalities affect the roll-out? • How will the “ sociology of important things” affect the roll-out?

15. How do handle non-central networks? • How do we offer premium service on college/departmental networks? • How do we handle the CAR where the net joins the campus net?

16. How do we allocate external QoS? • What data do we collect at the external gateway? • Do we allocate by • Policing - doable but imprecise • Quotas - require authentication and quota management tools • Auction - against university culture • Pricing - letting a marketplace set in

17. If we reserve or schedule... • Do we use RSVP? • Must we schedule both ends? • What time granularity do we accommodate? • What do we do with unscheduled premium service? • How do we handle preemptions? • What policies do we need for enforcement? • Does it complicate meeting on-demand requests?

18. How do we fund this? • What are the fixed costs? Are they one-time or frequent? • What are the variable costs? • How will NSP’s bill for premium service? • What are the advantages of underusing/overusing premium? • We can’t convert all the campus closets to 802.1p or high-performance at once. How do we deploy? • Remember that $500,000 per year we once promised….

19. What are the cost accounting/recovery issues? • The cost of accounting should be kept to a minimum. Do we have to count or can we use sampled data? • How to do usage-based pricing • Traffic usage pricing - incoming or outgoing • Threshold bands or absolute packet/byte counts • All packets or by application type • Rates can be modified by time of day, demand, etc.

20. Why not to do usage-based pricing? • Cost of administration and management • Flat or stairstep costs • Concerns for equity • Charging would not control demand • Charging for premium will deteriorate best-effort • We do not do usage-based charging for best-effort.

21. When to do the cost recovery? • Pre-paid • Dynamically at time of use • Post-usage audit and billback • How to handle returns and credits?

22. What to charge for usage-based pricing? • Money • Funny money and quotas • How to provide subsidies to support institutional goals?

23. Who to charge for usage-based pricing? • Individuals to shape behaviour • Departments and units to reflect programmatics and reasonable granularity • Campus management to minimize administration and policy issues

24. Next steps • Refine and promote the strawman as the technically tractable alternative. • Socialize the resulting economic and policy issues with campus I2 or CIO reps. • Stone Soup, Snowmass • Educom, CAUSE conferences • Fall I2 meeting • Produce policy alternatives paper for campus discussions