Beyond best effort: Router architectures for the differentiated services of tomorrow's Internet

With the transformation of the Internet into a commercial infrastructure, the ability to provide differentiated services to users with widely 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, Internet service providers would also like to provide customer-specific differentiated services using the same shared network infrastructure; In this article, we describe router architectures that can support the two trends of rising bandwidth demand and rising demand for differentiated services. We focus on router mechanisms that can support differentiated services at a level not contemplated in proposals currently under consideration due to concern regarding their implementability at high speeds. We consider the types of differentiated services that service providers may want to offer and then discuss the mechanisms needed in routers to support them. We describe plausible implementations of these mechanisms (the scalability and performance of which have been demonstrated by implementation in a prototype system) and argue that it is technologically possible to considerably raise the level of differentiated services which service providers can offer their customers, and that it is not necessary to restrict differentiated services to rudimentary offerings even in very-high-speed networks.