Design of the STARS Network QoS Reservation System

We are developing a trusted advance reservation system for network bandwidth. By "trusted" we mean that the system will be fraud-resistant: it will authenticate and check the authorization of each service requestor, and will prevent man-in-the-middle attacks by digitally signing all infor- mation exchanged over open networks. The system will allow service requestors to reserve net- work bandwidth in advance of using it, in order to support, e.g., coordinated use of distributed computing resources such as remote instruments connected to supercomputers. In particular, the system is designed to control the use of premium bandwidth—that is, classes of service that are better than the default best-effort quality of service (QoS).