Achieving Quality of Service through Network Performance Management
Srinivasan Keshav · 1998
We believe that current mechanisms for providing quality of service guarantees in integrated services networks have two major flaws. First, these mechanisms, such as signaling, scheduling, and reservations, require significant changes to the existing Internet. Second, they do not provide mechanisms for management of QoS state. In this paper, we present an alternative approach which attempts to provide `macroscopic' QoS guarantees through effective network management. 1. Introduction The Internet is exponentially increasing in breadth and depth. By an increase in breadth, we mean that the Internet is reaching ever more users, doubling its user population every year. This increase is likely to continue as developing countries get connected and small-footprint TCP/IP implementations bring embedded computers online. There is a parallel increase in depth, that is, in the set of services available to an endpoint. For many years, this set was small, and was provided by applications such a...