Chapter 9 - Quality of Service on the Internet

Although the Internet has been traditionally a best-effort network, the ability to provide a certain level of QoS for certain packet flows is essential for some applications. For example, while the user of a file transfer application may accept a longer transfer delay when the network is congested, a multimedia user may find trying to maintain a conversation with a long round-trip delay irritating. Such users would probably request a higher QoS for their multimedia flows than for the rest of their flows. However, QoS is not only about requesting a better treatment for certain flows; users also want...