Fundamental Design Issues for the Future

The Internet has been a startling and dramatic success. However, multimedia applications, with their novel traac characteristics and service requirements, pose an interesting challenge to the technical foundations of the Internet. In this paper we address some of the fundamental architectural design issues facing the future Internet. In particular, we discuss whether the Internet should adopt a new service model, how this service model should be invoked, and whether this service model should include admission control. These architectural issues are discussed in a nonrigorous manner, through the use of a utility function formulation and some simple models. While we do advocate some design choices over others, the main purpose here is to provide a framework for discussing the various architectural alternatives.