The Premium IP service defined by SEQUIN is an end-to-end service. Every network along the end-to-end path must support this service. As GÉANT interconnects most of the European National Research and Education Networks it should implement this service.
The Premium IP packets are tagged with the DSCP 46 (101110).
You can find the deployment status of the service on GÉANT.
The SEQUIN Premium IP states that for a Diffserv based implementation the amount of Premium IP which can be supported on a circuit is 10% of the circuit capacity (20% in case the traffic of a failed circuit is re-routed to a circuit of equivalent capacity). This limitation allows - in addition to the queuing mechanisms - to guarantee the metric. The Premium IP is destination aware. The destination awareness makes the path used by the Premium IP flows known and optimises the Premium IP utilisation on the links.
GÉANT accepts Premium IP aggregate flows from NRENs and polices these flows based on their next NREN AS and the bandwidth requested by the NREN. This access-control is needed to protect the Premium IP packets against misuse which could "degrade" the Premium IP performances. This is based on the assumption that the NRENs are themselves able to isolate the authorised Premium IP flows from others and to send only these authorised flows to GÉANT tagged as Premium IP (the others having to be retagged as Best Effort). If the NRENs don't re-tag the unauthorised Premium IP packets, GÉANT can do it for a limited amount of Premium IP requests based on source and destination IP addresses provided by the NREN or projects.
Classifiers and queuing mechanisms have been configured on most of the GÉANT interfaces. The classifier maps the Premium IP packets into a dedicated Premium IP queue. The other packets are classified in other queues according to their services tag. Weighted Round Robin is configured on the output interfaces and allocates 90% of the circuit capacity to the Premium IP queue to emulate a strict priority queue. Keep in mind that the Premium IP utilisation is around 10%-20% of the link capacity (thanks to the access control and the destination awareness of the model).
If you are sending packets tagged as Premium IP (DSCP 46) on GÉANT without having requested it, these packets will be considered as unauthorised on GÉANT and retagged as Best-Effort (DSCP 0 or DSCP 6) and treated as Best Effort on GÉANT and as Less than Best Effort on the first GÉANT router.
Premium IP request on GÉANT
The Premium IP user will have to request Premium IP from the Premium
IP technical contact in the NRENs involved. These technical contacts will
then request Premium IP from GÉANT. In case a Premium IP technical
contact doesn't exist in a NREN, the users can contact NEP
for the configuration of Premium IP on GÉANT for their project and
provide the following information (a Premium IP request is unidirectional,
if it is bi-directional, please specify it):
Currently, no SLA is offered for Premium IP as the monitoring infrastructure allowing the SLA metric verification is still under study.