There is a growing interest in the introduction of virtual circuit(VC)-like behaviors or stateful middleboxes in the Internet. While much of the focus has been in Quality of Service contexts, increasing attention is being paid to the necessity of general signaling for IP-based networks. In this talk we present our study on this challenging and controversal problem.

We will present an exteNSible IP Signaling (NSIS) architecture, which is being developed with a group of colleagues in the Internet community and expected to replace the previous RSVP protocol. We motive this work by a review of QoS components and RSVP as QoS signaling protocol, and identify extensibility, security, transport mechanism and mobility as general requirements when designing new signaling protocols. After discussing the principles of the protocol design, we present a prototype impelementation and preliminary performance evaluation for this approach.

Biography: Xiaoming Fu is a scientific assistant at the Telematics Group of the Institute for Informatics at the University of Göttingen, where he leads projects on Internet mobility and authentication, QoS and signaling, as well as protocol validation and testing. His research interests lie in computer systems, particularly networking, and mobile and distributed computing. Xiaoming received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Tsinghua University, China. Prior to joining Göttingen he spent almost two years working at the Telecommunications Networks Group at the Technical University Berlin as a research staff member.