Giving control to end-systems

Frank Kelly

Seventh International Workshop on Quality of Service, UCL, London,
June, 1999


Proposals for an Internet with differentiated services are usually based on a small number of service classes with well defined quality and prices. However the approach has drawbacks In particular, the development of ATM traffic classes has illustrated some of the difficulties of defining service categories before the applications that might use these categories have been invented or have become widespread, difficulties compounded by the requirement that associated pricing schemes be incentive-compatible for users.

In this talk we describe a radically different approach to differentiated services. Its premise is that a simple packet network may be able to support an arbitrarily differentiated set of services by conveying information on congestion from the network to intelligent end-nodes, which themselves determine what should be their demands on the packet network. We argue that there would then be no need for large buffers (and their associated latency) or priority queues within the network, or for connection acceptance control at the border of the network.


slides

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