LIBRA-An integrated framework for type of service-based adaptive routing in the Internet and intranets
A. Rodriguez-Moral · Bell Labs Technical Journal · 2002
The Internet's sustained explosive growth calls for a solution to several issues that affect access to the information disseminated over wide areas. Such growth also requires the delivery of real-time and traditional data traffic in an integrated fashion with increasing performance, reliability, and security. As recently as 1985, the Internet had only about 50 networks and 1,000 hosts. Now, however, these same numbers are well over 70,000 and 3,000,000, respectively, and they continue to increase at an astonishing rate. The current Internet architecture and service model are not well suited to support the increasing use of real-time applications, such as packet voice and video over the Internet, which demand bounded network delays and high bandwidth. The current Internet service model offers only a best-effort delivery service. It neither allows applications to request a certain quality of service (QoS) from the network nor includes mechanisms to enforce QoS characteristics, such as minimum delay or guaranteed bandwidth. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is developing a new and enhanced service model that can accommodate these elements. However, the current Internet architecture and service model provide some mechanisms that can be exploited to improve the performance offered to delay-sensitive traffic, thus reducing network congestion. LIBRA is an integrated framework that comprises some of these mechanisms, such as type of service-based adaptive routing, type of service-based packet scheduling, and load sharing, which are targeted to improve network performance and alleviate the congestion in current Internet protocol (IP) networks.