Judgment Call

摘要

Everybody knows the Internet needs QOS (quality of service) if it's ever going to grow up. Trouble is, nobody seems to know what IP QOS actually is—least of all the vendors who claim they can deliver it. It's time to set the record— and the industry—straight: None of the schemes now being hyped and hawked come close to delivering real QOS. That doesn't mean it's impossible to add QOS to IP— and the emphasis here is definitely on "add." But before we start tinkering with the protocol, we need a working definition: IP QOS enables a network to deliver a traffic flow end to end with the guaranteed maximum delay and guaranteed rate required by the user process (within agreed error boundaries).