King

Key components for the Internet of the Next Generation

The goal of the project is to establish an integrated solution for an IP platform that fulfills carrier-class requirements. The KING project involves a number of leading German research institutions and is fifty-fifty funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the initiator and partner of the project Siemens AG (today Siemens Nokia Networks).

Next Generation Networks (NGN) will need to support a variety of services, ranging from high-quality interactive real-time services (for example, voice or real-time video service) to the best-effort services already known on today’s internet.

The overall objective of the KING (Key components for the Internet of the Next Generation) research project is to develop efficient solutions for carrier-grade IP networks that satisfy high QoS and resilience requirements by means of a common approach, while at the same time providing low operational overheads.

Challenges

Next generation IP networks will support besides the best effort delivery model employed today a large number of new services including voice and video real-time communications, application service provisioning, online gaming and they must create the environment for novel services and service models to be developed. Within this framework a flexible and robust carrier-grade QoS architecture must be developed.

Project-Goals

The KING project defines a scalable, secure, highly resilient inter-domain QoS architecture able to deliver end-to-end guaranteed QoS on demand.
In particular Mobis has been involved in the design, implementation, testing and validation of the inter-domain resource reservation signalling protocol that supports QoS aggregation and its integration with the intra-domain border-to-border budget allocation concept developed in KING.

Technology

The various aspects of QoS provisioning have been long studied and a number of architectures such as IntServ, DiffServ, BGRP and many others have been proposed. Also QoS signalling is a current research topic within the IETF NSIS working group. The KING QoS architecture encompasses mechanisms and features of the existing technologies and enhances and integrates them to fulfil the critical aspects of resilience, flexibility and scalability.

Partners

• Siemens AG, today Siemens Nokia Networks (initiator of this project)
• Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Institute for Communication Systems, Munich (ESK)
• Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Institute for Open Communication systems, Berlin (FOKUS)
• University of Essen, Institut for Experimental Mathematics, Computer Networking Technology Group (TdR)
• University of Karlsruhe, Institute for Telematics (ITM)
• Technical University of Munich, Institute for Communication Networks (LKN)
• University of Stuttgart, Institute for Communication Networks and Computer Engineering
• University of Würzburg, Institut for Computer Science, Department of Distributed Systems