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Abstract : |
he Internet is being used by business and user communities with widely varied service expectations from the network infrastructure. For example, many companies rely on the Internet for the day-to-day management of their global enterprise. These companies are willing to pay a substantially higher cost for the best possible service level from the Internet. Similarly, there are many users who are willing to pay a higher Internet access fee in order to make use of demanding applications, such as IP telephony and videoconferencing. At the same time, there are millions of users who want to pay as little as possible for more elementary services, like exchanging e-mails and/or surfing the Web. In addition to this variety of user expectations, there has also been a rapid evolution in the set of Internet applications. A few years ago the key Internet applications were only e-mail, ftp, or newsgroups. In contrast, the present-day Internet applications have widely diverse service needs because they transfer a wide, |
