BEYOND BEST EFFORT - ROUTER ARCHITECTURES FOR THE DIFFERENTIATED SERVICES OF TOMORROWS INTERNET

With the transformation of the Internet into a commercial infrastructu re, the ability to provide differentiated services to users with widel y varying requirements is rapidly becoming as important as meeting the massive increases in bandwidth demand. Hence, while deploying routers , switches, and transmission systems of ever increasing capacity, Inte rnet service providers would also like to provide customer-specific di fferentiated services using the same shared network infrastructure; In this article, we describe router architectures that can support the t wo trends of rising bandwidth demand and rising demand for differentia ted services. We focus on router mechanisms that can support different iated services at a level not contemplated in proposals currently unde r consideration due to concern regarding their implementability at hig h speeds. We consider the types of differentiated services that servic e providers may want to offer and then discuss the mechanisms needed i n routers to support them. We describe plausible implementations of th ese mechanisms (the scalability and performance of which have been dem onstrated by implementation in a prototype system) and argue that it i s technologically possible to considerably raise the level of differen tiated services which service providers can offer their customers, and that it is not necessary to restrict differentiated services to rudim entary offerings even in very-high-speed networks.