Priority and Realtime Data Transfer over the Best-effort Internet

The current Internet provides a single class of§best-effort service with no guarantee as to when or§even whether a packet is to be delivered. Network§applications, however, have a wide variety of quality§of service requirements. Achieving the diverse§requirements of the applications using the§single-class service is a challenging task.§In this book, we study providing real-time and§prioritized data transfer over the best-effort§Internet, emphasizing a practical application-level§approach using TCP, which requires no change to the§current Internet architecture and transport§protocols. We exemplify this approach using three§widely used applications: multimedia streaming,§low-priority data transfer, and multipath data§transfer. Our work demonstrates that the diverse§requirements of a number of network applications can§be achieved using a practical application-level§approach built on top of TCP, and intelligently§utilizing the internal mechanisms in TCP can§dramatically simplify the design of an§application-level service.§This book is for both researchers and practitioners§in the field, and graduate students who are§interested in computer networks.