Final Project, with Inclusion of Security Assessment

Quality of Service (QoS) for network infrastructures is an industry set of requirements and protocols for establishing quality performance of demanding applications. The utilization of QoS protocols, network administrators can use their current resources handily to establish appropriate levels of service without reactively increasing or over plan their networks. The goal of QoS is to provide an advantageous delivery service for demanding applications that need ample bandwidth while controlling latency, jitter, and reducing data loss. Below, is how Learning Team A is determining the necessary Service Level Agreement’s (SLA’s) along with the QoS expectations for CloudCrushers and how performance will be measured against those SLA’s.

Appropriate Protocols.

Quality of Service or QoS for CloudCrushers will be measured in terms of the ability of the network to provide enhanced services to the users over the Ethernet, Frame Relay and IP-routed network. There are some protocols that will be used in regard to improving the services like ensuring jitter and latency control, dedicated network bandwidth and improve the loss characteristics.

Resource reservation protocol (RSVP) is one of the protocols that will be utilized by Cloud Crushers to help maintain the Quality of Service within the network. In the RSVP protocol, data will be flowing within the network as a series of messages or packets that have the same destination address, source address and same QoS (Rawlins, 2014). The protocol will also ensure resources are reserved for the data that is in unidirectional format or simplex flow of data that flows between sender and receiver. A sender in this case will be at the upstream of the network while the receiver will be at the downstream. If a user in the Cloud Crushers headquarters wished to send some information that requires the QoS, the protocol will send it a special message through a PATH message to the receiver downstream.

COPS is another standard protocol that the PEPs and PDPs will be using to communicate. A PDS is a policy decision point which is defined as a logical entity for interpreting the RSVP’s policies for requests and is responsible for making decisions (Nguyen, 2003). PDP is appoint that will determine the host to get QoS, time and place. Common Open Policy Service or COPS is therefore a very simple request-response protocol that requires the PDPs to have certain states to make them remember the requests from PEPs.

MPLS; a Multi-Protocol Label Switching is also another protocol that will be used in the network. It is one of the preferred protocols because it has a capability of offering up to eight classes of QoS. MPLS will be responsible for ensuring data packets are carried from one network to another with a high performance. It will be utilized between regional sites and remote sites to the headquarters.

Measuring Quality of Service.

Tools used to measure quality of services include the NetFlow and Cisco Class-based QoS MIB. These tools work in the same way that involves generating reports that can be used to analyze the effectiveness of Quality of Service implementation. These tools provide reports regarding the number and type of packet dropped and the trends in the utilization of links (Rawlins, 2014). Cisco QoS helps collect huge amounts of data regarding the network and the QoS related information like latency and jitter control. NetFlow on the other hand measures the QoS by classifying the information on packet drops and link utilization into simpler forms that can be easily interpreted. The tool also sorts the collected data and flags those rates of packet drops (Nguyen, 2003).

Service Level Agreement.

The Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the business and the provider will include multiple layers and those layers will touch on some main points and concepts. These points include the five nines of up so that CloudCrushers sees minimal downtime and if downtime does exceed the minimum, there will be compensation. The SLA will also include a maintenance contact that will ensure 24/7/365 support in any event. The ISP will also maintain all equipment and maintenance on that equipment for the life of the SLA to include all configurations such as QoS, Packet Shaping, and Traffic Policing. Finally, there will be a review period for the SLA, where it will be reviewed by both parties to ensure a level of satisfaction on each side and to ensure it meets the needs of the client.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have identified for CloudCrushers the importance of Quality of Service (QoS). By using the appropriate protocols mentioned above, CloudCrushers network administrators can minimize jitter and perform latency control while dedicating network bandwidth to critical applications and improving data loss. I’ve also mentioned and decided tools that will be used to measure quality of services for CloudCrushers and the importance of SLA’s and how they will be handled by the ISP’s.

References

Nguyen, T. M. T., Boukhatem, N., & Puiolle, G. (2003). COPS-SLS usage for dynamic policy- based QoS management over heterogeneous IP networks. IEEE network, 17(3), 44-50.

Rawlins, Diana, Lei Yao, and David E. McDysan. (2014) "Edge-based per-flow QOS admission control in a data network." U.S. Patent No. 8,811,423. 19.