Internet currently offers only "best effort" service and all packets are treated equally. While this has worked well in the past, there is increasingly a need for different quality services so that audio, video, and other time-critical streams can be supported well even under congestion.

A number of working groups in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) are working on developing facilities to allow new services. The work currently underway in the integrated services (intserv), resource reservation (RSVP), multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), and QoS routing (qosr) groups will be explained in this talk.

Integrated services group has introducted two new services called "Controlled load" and "Guaranteed" Services. RSVP is the IP signaling protocol that allows users to reserve resources for these new services. While integrated services and RSVP have been designed for the most part, the problems in their implementation have raised questions about feasibility of their deployment in large backbone networks.

A new working group called differentiated services (diff-serv) has, therefore, been started to work on simple mechanisms that can be used in backbone networks. The goals and current status of this work will also be presented.

This is a tutorial talk and everyone is welcome.

Presentation slides in Adobe Acrobat 3.0 Format (2,104,589 bytes, 1 slide/page)