Design Guidelines for an Internet-Scaled QoS Framework

Adding quality of service support to the best-effort Internet is something that has been suggested and researched for a long time now. While individual networks are starting to offer QoS, it remains as elusive as ever for the Internet as a whole. A number of different QoS solutions are being deployed within networks leading to a highly heterogeneous Internet. On the other hand, there are a number of proposed standards that try to solve such great heterogeneity with fully-tailored architectures. The thesis of this paper is that heterogeneity should not be fought; instead, tussles will eventually arise among different approaches and these should be the vector towards evolution and hence must be allowed as part of the design. Each domain should be free to make its own internal choices on how to deliver QoS, while presenting a common interface. The problem then becomes the coordination of the decisions of different domains. The design of such a framework presents several key choices, which will be investigated