Random Thoughts on Delivering End-to-End Quality of Service on the Internet

摘要

Quality of service continues to be a hotly debated topic in the networking community primarily because of deep-seated religious preferences and technical bias. Take a moment to examine the fact that on the Internet we are collectively dealing with a single common bearer service: the IP. If one can realize that any type of guarantee is unachievable, then differentiated classes of service by delivering varying levels of best effort constitute arguably the best method of achieving QoS on the Internet. In addition, considering the issue of using pockets of layer 2 infrastructure in an unreliable attempt to deliver QoS, using existing mechanisms in IP represents a simple approach to an otherwise confounding problem. It stands to reason then that simplicity lends itself to elegance.