Residential broadband Internet services and applications requirements

Consumer interest in accessing the Internet for browsing the World Wide Web has exploded in the past two years. The current narrowband residential Internet access infrastructure using dial-up through the PSTN not only is too slow, but also leads to high service blocking probability. Hence, providing an "always-on" high-speed Internet access service has been viewed as the new killer application for residential broadband networks. Residential broadband Internet service design requires understanding of the networking requirements of broadband Internet applications. This article provides a framework for characterizing applications requirements in general, with special emphasis on Internet applications such as Web browsing. The author presents a classification of applications based on their networking requirements, and discusses the traffic and quality of service requirements for each application class.