Inter-AS coordination of QoS policies

The operator of an administrative domain A can use QPPB to signal to a peer administrative domain B that traffic sent to specific prefixes advertised by domain A should receive a particular QoS treatment in domain B. More specifically, an ASBR of domain A can advertise a prefix XYZ to domain B and include a BGP community attribute with the route. The community value implies a particular QoS treatment, as agreed by the two domains (in their peering agreement or service level agreement, for example). When the ASBR and other routers in domain B accept and install the route for XYZ into their routing table, they apply a QoS policy on selected interfaces that classifies traffic toward network XYZ into the QoS class implied by the BGP community value.

QPPB may also be used to request that traffic sourced from specific networks receive appropriate QoS handling in downstream nodes that may span different administrative domains. This can be achieved by advertising the source prefix with a BGP community, as discussed above. However, in this case other approaches are equally valid, such as marking the DSCP or other CoS fields based on source IP address so that downstream domains can take action based on a common understanding of the QoS treatment implied by different DSCP values.

In the above examples, coordination of QoS policies using QPPB could be between a business customer and its IP VPN service provider, or between one service provider and another.