Value of Class-of-Service (CoS) Support in the Internet Backbone

 

Problem Statement and Motivation - People - Publications

 

Problem Statement and Motivation

The user expectation of Internet use has moved from best-effort connectivity to an expectation of reasonable performance & capacity for all types of applications. QoS-sensitive applications like IPTV, gaming, and VoIP could be offered over such a converged IP broadband end-to-end network. Network service providers also would like to support such applications effectively. They need to provision their networks to meet the service level agreements (SLAs). Customer experiences need to be protected and predictable despite network failures and changes in demand as well as application mix.

 

Currently there is a wide ranging debate on the issue of “network neutrality” which involves both economic and technical aspects. One key aspect of the net neutrality debate is whether best effort application traffic should be carried along with other (so-called “premium”) traffic for which SLA commitments have been made (or are expected, either explicitly or implicitly) without differentiation. An assertion often made in this context is that over-provisioning is an economically viable strategy due to the declining cost of capacity, instead of incurring the complexity and operational costs of running a differentiated-services network. Our study focuses on this specific question within the larger debate. We compare a classless network which is over-provisioned against an engineered network using per-class queuing to offer Class-of-Service (CoS) (i.e., differentiated-service) and meet user expectations and SLAs. In most situations a differentiated network can save significantly over a classless network.

 

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Problem Statement and Motivation - People - Publications

 

Last updated on January 13, 2011