Link repair in managed multi-domain connections with end-to-end quality guarantees

The Internet is a platform providing connection channels for various services. Whereas for services like email the best-effort nature of the Internet can be considered sufficient, other services strongly depend on service-specific connection quality parameters. This quality dependence has led to dedicated content distribution networks as a workaround solution for services like YouTube. Such workarounds are applicable to a small number of services only. With the global application of the Internet, the impact of quality of service varies from annoyance due to jitter in VoIP communication to endangering human lives in telemedicine applications. Thus network connections with end-to-end quality guarantees are indispensable for various existing and evolving services. In this paper we consider point-to-point multi-domain network connections for which the end-to-end quality has to be assured. Our contribution includes the classification of fault cases in general and countermeasures against end-to-end performance degradation. By correlating events and reasonable countermeasures, this work provides the foundation for quality assurance during the operation phase of end-to-end connections. We put our contribution in the context of a vision of global-goal-aware self-adaptation in computer networks and outline further research areas that require a similar classification to the work provided here. Copyright (C) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.