Incentive-Based Traffic Management and QoS Measurements

We argue that the current Best Effort Quality of Service (QoS) strategy of the Internet is one of the reasons why meaningful quality indicators and measurements are hard to define over the Internet. At the same time, Session-based QoS has emerged for mobile communication, VoIP and IPTV services. However, it is way too complex for widespread usage and cannot out-weight the simplicity being the primary advantage of Internet’s success. Incentive-based strategies have been proposed as lightweight alternatives to traditional solutions in the past decade. As an example, we explore the Core Stateless QoS strategy and show that it is simple, it still provides a fine control of QoS, and that it can also provide a network wide congestion metric. It enables inter-domain policy translation by implementing hierarchical resource sharing policies of arbitrary depth. Furthermore, it also enables network operators and subscribers to carry out meaningful measurements, ensure and verify Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and support networkendpoints signals. We propose future work in this area, including the integration of measurements into the Traffic Management strategies, that are needed for the widespread deployment.