The Evolving Internet - Traffic, Engineering, and Roles
Joseph D. Houle, Kadangode K. Ramakrishnan, Rita Sadhvani, Murat Yüksel, Shiv Kalyanaraman · 2007
Entertainment and real-time applications like voice-over-IP, medical telemetry, network gaming and streaming video are quickly becoming prevalent applications over packet-based communication networks. Not only do these applications demand a very diverse set of network performance requirements, networks themselves are also experiencing rapid growth in the number of users and traffic per user. There have traditionally been two canonical approaches to handling such needs: (i) provide substantially increased bandwidth to create sufficient overall capacity in a best-effort network, or (ii) provide class-based differentiated service to meet each application’s performance requirements. The current network neutrality debate reflects the tension between providing substantial additional capacity to meet the most demanding application needs while exploring viable business models to fund this capacity growth. We examine three dimensions to lend insight to this ongoing debate. First, we discuss traffic growth projections followed by a review of application performance requirements. Next, while assuming a mix of emerging as well as traditional applications, we develop queueing models for an IP backbone to quantify the economies achievable with a differentiated network compared to a best-effort network with enough capacity to achieve the required performance. Finally, we examine a variety of content delivery models to understand the flexibility