Supporting Quality of Service for Internet Multimedia Applications

Abstract

The Internet has gone from near-invisibility to near-ubiquity and penetrated into every aspect of society in the past decades (Department of Commerce, 1998). The application scenarios have also changed dramatically, and now demand a more sophisticated service model from the network. In the early 1990s, there was a large-scale experiment in sending digitized voice and video across the Internet through a packetswitched infrastructure (Braden, Clark, & Shenker, 1994). These highly-visible experiments have depended upon three enabling technologies: (1) Many modern workstations now come equipped with built-in multimedia hardware, (2) IP multicasting, which was not yet generally available in commercial routers, and (3) Highly-sophisticated digital audio and video applications have been developed. It became clear from these experiments that an important technical element of the Internet is still missing: multimedia, which dominate increasing proportion of today’s data traffic, are not well supported on the Internet.