Foundations of convergence in IP packet networks

Business imperatives argue for a single IP-based network infrastructure for the transport of enterprise and consumer networking applications. The converged infrastructure must reliably provide ideal, deterministic performance and assured delivery for all networked applications, even during throughput DoS attacks. The paper argues that conventional IP routing architectures are fundamentally incapable of supporting convergence because of intrinsic performance, efficiency, and security issues. A simple change in packet forwarding logic is all that is needed to resolve these issues. This change does not require any collateral changes to IP, to layer 2 protocols, or to transport-layer protocols such as UDP and TCP. Implementations in the form of packet sequencing technology enable multiple networked applications with different service quality needs to coexist peacefully and efficiently on a common infrastructure, while enjoying deterministic performance guarantees and immunity from throughput DoS attacks that congest network links.