Premium IP

Premium IP is a service that offers network priority over other traffic on GÉANT. Premium IP traffic takes priority over all other services, such as Best Efforts (BE) and Less Than Best Efforts (LBE). During times of congestion, Premium IP traffic receives a better, and guaranteed, level of network performance. This can be particularly useful for real-time applications, such as Voice Over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing.

Premium IP provides a service similar to that of a virtual leased line. Data packets that are sent using the Premium IP service will experience no congestion in the network regardless of the load of the other traffic classes. As a result, delay and packet loss are kept to a minimum.

In order to effectively send and receive data using Premium IP, each network on the end-to-end path travelled by the data must support the same Premium IP service model. As GÉANT interconnects most of the European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), it has implemented the Premium IP service model defined by the SEQUIN project.

The Premium IP service on GÉANT provides the following performance metrics:

Upper-bounded one-way delay
Upper-bounded Instantaneous Packet Delay Variation (IPDV)
No packet loss due to congestion
Guaranteed capacity

Requesting Premium IP

In order to use the Premium IP service on GÉANT, you must contact your NREN who will make a reservation for you. Your NREN will require the following information:

Email address and telephone number for a technical contact and a backup technical contact
Contact details for the end-site technical contact, if possible
Source IP addresses that will send Premium IP data
Destination IP addresses that will receive Premium IP data
The amount of capacity requested, in Mbps
Details of the application used and project description
Request start and end dates (granularity of service duration is one day)
Whether the PIP service should be uni-directional (source to destination only) or bi-directional (PIP from destination to source as well).

Please note the following:

Your NREN will require notice of at least 2 working days for the reservation.
The maximum length of time a reservation can be made for is 3 months.
A reservation can be made up to 3 months in advance.
A request for more than 250Mbps PIP will require additional approval, and therefore more notice will be required.
Any traffic which exceeds the agreed data rate will be dropped.
Whilst traffic sent using PIP is guaranteed to be given the fastest possible transit through GÉANT, the availability of the service itself is not guaranteed.

Using Premium IP

Premium IP packets should be tagged with DSCP 46 (101110). Any packets tagged as Premium IP (with DSCP 46) that are sent to GÉANT without prior reservation will be considered unauthorised and will be re-tagged as Best Effort (DSCP 0 or DSCP 6). They will then be treated as Less Than Best Effort on the first GÉANT router and as Best Effort on subsequent GÉANT routers.

Packets that are tagged with DSCP 40 (101000) will always be forwarded as Best Effort traffic, but without the packets being re-marked. This means that packets can be tagged so that they receive Premium IP in the peer networks (i.e. NRENs) and Best Effort in the GÉANT network.

Monitoring

The available network capacity for Premium IP traffic is currently monitored for each link by a tool called Taksometro. The TF-NGN Performance Monitoring activity is currently working on a monitoring infrastructure to measure one-way delay, IPDV, packet loss.

Service Level Agreement

Currently, no Service Level Agreement (SLA) is offered for Premium IP as the monitoring infrastructure allowing the SLA metric verification is still under study.