A Retrospective Analysis of QoS Deployment, Operation and Use in Enterprise and Provider Networks

Quality of Service (QoS) has been in development within the research community for over 20 years but concerns have always existed over the practicalities of large scale and truly pervasive deployments of this technology. Now that QoS-enabled services are being offered within the research community and elsewhere, these issues are again coming to the fore and a range of approaches to QoS have been adopted. As a result, there is currently no de facto model for the use of QoS in a given scenario and the existing heterogeneous environment may even hamper its wider applicability as an end-to-end solution. In this paper we analyze this in the context of our own research to draw some conclusions on current 'best practice' for QoS deployments in the large. Our aim is to propose a broader approach to QoS, refocusing the discussion on future directions in network quality.