Network multimedia applications constitute a large part of Internet traffic and guaranteed delivery of such traffic is a challenge because of their sensitivity to delay, packet loss and higher bandwidth requirement. The need for guaranteed traffic delivery is exacerbated by the increasing delay experienced by traffic propagating through more than one QoS domain. Hence, there is a need for a flexible and a scalable QoS manager that handles and manages the needs of traffic flows throughout multiple IPv6 domains. The IPv6 QoS manager, presented in this paper, uses a combination of the packets’ flow ID and the source address (Domain Global Identifier (DGI)), to process and reserve resources inside an IPv6 domain. To ensure inter-domain QoS management, the QoS domain manager should also communicate with other QoS domains’ managers to ensure that traffic flows are guaranteed delivery. In this scheme, the IPv6 QoS manager handles QoS requests by either processing them locally if the intended destination is located locally or forwards the request to the neighboring domain’s QoS manager. End-to-end QoS is achieved with an integrated admission and management unit. The feasibility of the proposed QoS management scheme is illustrated for both intra- and inter-domain QoS management. The scalability of the QoS management scheme for inter-domain scenarios is illustrated with simulations for traffic flows propagating through two and three domains. Excellent average end-to-end delay results have been achieved when traffic flow propagates through more than one domain. Simulations show that packets belonging to non-conformant flows experience increased delay, and such packets are degraded to lower priority if they exceed their negotiated traffic flow rates. Many pricing schemes have been proposed for QoS-enabled networks. However, integrated pricing and admission control has not been studied in detail. A dynamic pricing model is integrated with the IPv6 QoS manager to study the effects of increasing traffic flows rates on the increased cost of delivering high priority traffic flows. The pricing agent assigns prices dynamically for each traffic flow accepted by the domain manager. Combining the pricing strategy with the QoS manager allows only higher priority traffic packets that are willing to pay more to be processed during congestion. This approach is flexible and scalable as end-to-end pricing is decoupled from packet forwarding and resource reservation decisions. Simulations show that additional revenue is generated as prices change dynamically according to the network congestion status.
