Quest for the End-to-end Network Qos

Providing end-to-end (ETE) guarantees and quality-of-service to a diverse class of applications on the Internet has become the Holy Grail for networking researchers. As the growth of the Internet continues, service providers are facing interesting challenges that include: network design, engineering, pricing structures and business models that maximize profit. In this paper, we first present taxonomy of approaches to solving the ETE QOS problem. Most of these approaches are technical mechanisms that have been developed by various standardization bodies. However, we point out that there is clear evidence that suggests using socio-economic approaches to solve this problem. We describe a novel bandwidth broker approach that integrates game theory, utility theory and pricing mechanisms to come up with heuristics. This is on-going research but we describe our current work to date using these new ideas.