1. Introduction
There is no question that there has been a radical shift in the type of services carried over the Internet. Changes in technology and bandwidth availability have been leveraged by new Internet protocols to realize new services, all of which are implemented over the same core network. This is truly a widening of the functions available to a customer, as the simple data delivery mechanisms have been extended down the food-chain to offer virtual private networks, virtual LANs, and pseudo wires to carry transport circuits over the connectionless infrastructure of the Internet.
Hui-Ling Lin is also an Ph.D graduate of Department of Industrial Engineering and Enterprise Information, Tunghai University.