Internet QoS: Pieces of the puzzle

One of the biggest challenges faced when dealing with QoS over the Internet is how to deliver QoS over an unregulated, connectionless network that was designed, deployed, operated, managed, and commercialized without any QoS perspectives. This article gives a concise but comprehensive overview of the Internet QoS puzzle. We aim not only at identifying all the pieces of the puzzle, but also at discovering how to join them together. These include terminology, definitions and standards, architectures, traffic engineering, regulation, accounting, pricing, and marketing. We also explain throughout the article how network providers should envision their service offerings in the context of an SLA and QoS-centric Internet.